I also do not think the tech update will not really need the rest of the year. If I remember correctly, DC had twice the problem that he lost members in his crew and needed to get new ones. Which costs time.
I know the DC is thinking about another game, but I really hope there is material for 10 years of updates. I am still hoping he get more people involved in his project to decrease the time between updates.
Changing team members reallly only influenced single updates, but not really the bigger picture. In the end the speed of the development always depends on DC. He is drawing his ~50 hours or so per week and that's the content we'll get. Given that nobobdy but him actually works fulltime on the project, he wouldn't even have to hire more people, those who work for him would just have to start working fulltime.
That's also why there's little hope for faster releases, simply because he can't/won't increase his output. The only way to speed things up again would be to save "art" somewhere in the process, by using less art, producing worse quality, etc. but that won't happen. Or he could hire another artist, but the pro and cons of that have been discussed like 100 times already.
Tl;dr: Don't set yourself up for disappoinment by hoping for much faster updates, it just won't happen.
