Honestly, I think the reason the update took so long was due to the new system that was being made for the Labyrinth, a system that was most likely used for Venefica's section (hopefully we won't be stuck in an eternal Labyrinth loop lol). There's a lot of things being made behind the scenes which is where I'm guessing most of the dev time went for the past two months to prepare for the next major story expansion. It's why the last few updates seem smaller in comparison because there aren't that many scenes by comparison.
Imho, Threshold is doing right by us by giving us some new content to tide us over, even if it is minimal, instead of holding everything back for "one big patch." These are increment patches for sure. It keeps the community engaged, talking, and experiencing new content. There are quite a few games on here that would take the same amount of time and give even LESS content so I'm thankful for Threshold for making visible game progress.
The Labyrinth is most likely continuing apace and I hope to see how much progress is made by the December update which i believe is next. Hopefully it's finished by then and if not we have some more juicy content to enjoy to tide us over. So yeah, this update may be small, but as someone that has dealt with devs giving even SMALLER (like half as big as this. They'd probably do half of the Venefica content alone aka you can enter into her house, fight the Alurane, and that's it and call it an update), I really do appreciate the effort.
Keep up the good work Threshold. You have my support!