It is quite likely we won't see the mk9 project until 2021, for reasons I've already said and sum has sort of confirmed. His new "shorts" are like that because those aren't actual short projects, but the result of practice sessions on blender. He won't split animations in sfm and blender, there's no point in that. And now with his new PC arriving next month, it should speed up rendering and as a result, deliver projects faster. But Sum has taken things at slower pace sin like mid 2018, when he got more patreons from MBF2, so I don't know and I don't expect to see any improvement on communication and releases.
In NW1 it was just Liz, and that gave him room to make something even slightly believable. In NW2 Sum felt the need to make a lot of scenes with different characters, so he did just that but without planning the story 1st. So he ended up making the story after the scenes and not long before release, pretty much rushing it. The only part that made sense in NW2 was Kirsty's