Ok I'll try to explain the main gist. Do note that I'll make a lot of assumptions.
The basic premise is that MC gets 3~ times better at everything after evolving, by comparing level 1 and level 2. This is what happened:
Level 1 MC gains on average 0.33 (14/42) power per day.
The usual ranges to complete the level 1 story arc is 9-14 I think.
When MC evolves he becomes about 3 times as powerful as he used to be. (29-34 vs 9-14)
Level 2 MC gains on average 1.1 (66/58) power per day.
The usual ranges to complete the level 2 story arc is 90-115 power.
When MC evolves he again becomes about 3 times as powerful as he used to be (290-315 vs 90-115)
When 0.96 dropped, I calculated how many power points MC could get. These are the "power gains" data for 0.96
Days at level 3: 12
Gains:
10 - Nyx's Serum
10 - Fighting Asura
10 - Training 1
3 - Training 2
15 - Shopkeep
48 power points over 12 days. This means an improvement rate of 4, which is close enough to my premise.
From there on, there are two ways to proceed.
Possibility 1 - It will continue in a linear fashion:
The reason I don't like this possibility is because it means that MC will improve at 3.5~ power per day and reach around 900 total power, which will take him 170 in game days. This seems like too much time. I expect the game to barely last 250 ingame days
Possibility 2 - Normalize it somehow:
I've been thinking, if I take the level 2 data and divide them with the level 1 data, I will get some factors that I can apply to level 2 data to predict how level 3 will behave. If I do this, the power improvement rate stays similar. So I applied to anything that made sense, made some calculations and I quite liked what I saw.
So from the possibility 2, I predicted that MC will have a power improvement rate of 1.1 * (1.1/0.33) = 3.8~ per day and he will stay at level 3 for 58 * (58/42) = 80~ days. MC will finish this level with around 650-750 power and reach level 4 with about 2000 power.
I compared this progression to monster reports and some ingame dialogue (Asura power level, Lt Duncan's power in comparison to level 5s) and I like it a lot more than the linear one.
At the rate of a week covered per update that'd be more than 10 updates. Unless there's a time skip in there, not really seeing it.
Considering that the general consensus is that the game is about half done, staying level 3 for 10 updates is acceptable. We have already gone through 3 of them and I expect the twin arc to last 3 more updates.
Additionally MC doesn't really have to stay long at level 4 thanks to the evolution serum so WW can jumpstart the endgame without too much hassle if he wants to.
Some more info:
The game started back in 2021-Feb-13 with
Level 1 and 2: 0.1. 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.65, 0.7, 0.75, 0.8, 0.85, 0.88, 0.9, 0.92, 0.94 and lastly 0.95 where MC evolves.
Level 3: 0.95, 0.96, 0.97
I think it's fair to assume that there is no way MC will evolve before 1.0. There exists some possibility that things will get nasty and MC will evolve at this point, but to me it feels a bit too rushed. MC hasn't even begun to explore his level 3 capabilities.
While WW's version numbers aren't consistent, the increments are smaller than they used to be, so I expect to see 0.98 and 0.99 before 1.0.