If making really long updates is their way to milk patreons as long as they can, then let me say that's probably the worst strategy to do it anyway, here's why.
The game can't be finished, that's a fact you have almost endless possibilities and ideas to make, tons of character to develop and new to create. There are so much possibilities that making it slower is not even worth as it just kills the game slowly but surely.
There's still so much content to make and update, that DC would still have 4-5 years to at least do them without having to make slow ass updates every 1 year. The game has so much content potential that it doesn't make sense to make things slower on purpose. So either there's some internal issue that we don't know much about that makes the update release long or DC chooses the worst possible strategy for his incomes.