Not really, yes he did some work on stream and they did some groundwork but he was mainly working on daisy's update. The real work started in january.
Else it's pretty certain that the updates will become a little bit quicker again, once everybody is on the rig system.
When it comes to the number of updates, DC could easily realease 7 or 8 updates a year and nothing would change. Split the teacher's update in 4 (1 monthly update for each teacher), split Crystal's content and the threesome from Roxxy and there we are back the to 8 updates, though nothing would have changed contentwise. I personally don't see that the work which has gone into the updates has decreased and I haven't seen any reasonable arguments for it.
Yes, because most updates in those 1,5 years were not as good compared to what we get now and DC did indeed likely care more about realeasing updates than about a good quality standard (as one probably should while growing a base). The shading for the most part was really bad, I mean, just look at the old
You must be registered to see the links
and
You must be registered to see the links
for example. Do you really want that back? I don't. Just as I don't want stories like Jenny's back where you'll basically repeat the same quest 3 times and all DC has to do is change the toy MC holds in his hands. Yes, that's very fast to do but in the end it's boring. Compare that to Diane's new delivery quests, where each has a small, individual story on different locations. I'm happy that this old quest design is gone now. Same goes for the animations. I don't want those old, fast, 2 frame animations back, do you? So if we may agree that the content gets better, we may also agree that producing that better content will broadly take more time.