Damn they did crank up the jealousy a lot. I remember when you could for the first time pick it and it was barely noticeable but now...
I've just been picking all of the "ALL THREE OF US ARE GOING TO BE FRIENDS, GODDAMN IT!" options.
In my head it's just the MC in a state of manic denial, telling themselves that they can force the universe to work the way they think it should by sheer force of will. "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CHANGE UNLESS I SAY SO!"
"What's that? Qui and Tam don't get along any more? I WILL SMILE HARDER AND HOLD THEIR HANDS AND DRAG THEM PLACES TOGETHER AND WE WILL ALL BE FRIENDS FOREVER!"
Ironically, I'm not even really angling for a polycule though. I'm playing myself as having a somewhat obsessive crush on Tam from early on, but I'm still in a teen angst spiral of doubting she feels the same way about me, no matter how much evidence points to the contrary.
Hi guys I remember I played this 4-5 months back after(I think) a few updates had passed since the last time I'd played but I ended up at nearly the same spot in the story(first day of school, going to collect Qiu and Tamarack after a timeskip) so I wanted to check and see before I try and get caught up again if I somehow did something wrong last time and missed a bunch of content; do I need a new game?
The timeskip scene you described is the start of "Step 2". Last time around they included part of it as a bit of a sneak-peek preview (mainly to show how the transition works), but it wasn't finished.
This update, they added a few extra scenes to Step 1 (before the timeskip). And the scene after the timeskip has a little more content in it.
If you have staggered save files, with one prior to the timeskip, you should be able to open that save and play through all of the new content.
If the only save you have is during the timeskip content from last update, you'll have to start over.