Adding the Neighbours was probably something Icstor tried to hide behind why he was gonna be late. He said that it would finish in August with them included. But I think he didn't realise, that he didn't establish anything about them, and he had to invent them from the ground up, so he had to create whole new content he didn't have any context to, not even a concept of what they could do, whereas if he just made Caroline and Celia, he had already a lot on his mind he wanted to do with them and a big part their story was already established.
I thought that the update would be realistically finished by August without the neighbours and I was fine with that, but when I read about neighbours who had just one tiny unrelated scene, I was thinking "How the hell is he gonna make it if he has to create 2 new characters from scratch?". Well... we see the result. He should have just said "I will finish in august with the planned content and some extra scenes, sorry for the delay, I underestimated the amount of work." or something like that. In the end, I don't think it hurt him anyway, because he has a ton of patrons, but it would at least be a fair move and it wouldn't cost us that those hundreds (hey, it's probably more than a thousand) pages of spam.
