Erm... Doing new drawings has always been a part of the polishing work. And yes, it's still hard to be any more transparent than these devs. They show how much they are earning, they show how much work they've done every day, and they say what they'll be focusing next on a weekly basis. As always, not believing them doesn't mean they are lying.
For those claiming that they are taking these months of 'polishing' to do all the work they didn't do in the past, what would be the point of including this work under the 'edit' tag? It's actually counterproductive. They could just keep adding art or writing tasks as they go (as they are doing now adding new edit tasks), keeping the progress on the tracker's 'content' bars below 100%, and they'd be happier. Because once those bars reached 100%, people just assumed the update was around the corner (even though devs warned it would take more time than in previous updates), so every time the editing bar doesn't advance toward completion people feel even more frustrated because they now have higher expectations than before. Which can't be positive in any way for devs. No one in their sane mind is going to subscribe after 2 years since the last update, no matter how close the new update is claimed to be, and those still subscribed who were considering dropping their support won't feel exactly reassured by this extra long polishing phase. You can say that those in doubt may have unsubscribed for sure if the content bars weren't at 100% already, but if they were in doubt in April, trusted devs once more because they said they were polishing it, and now they see that 3 months later they are still polishing it, not only they'd unsubscribe anyway: chances are they wouldn't be coming back ever again because they'd do feel cheated even if they aren't. Because it's obvious that this long phase raises this kind of suspicion about devs doing their homework late and lying about it, which only makes them look worse in the eyes of potential subscribers even if it isn't actually true.
So why allow that when they could just admit they are still in the content creation phase, where people could only accuse them of being slow or lazy? Devs apparently never lied before, so why start now, and like this? Seriously, this theory is not very consistent when you actually think about it. Considering how their work on previous updates went, it seems more likely that devs have actually completed an alpha version they are not very happy with and they are now vastly improving it, and that's exactly what they are communicating. As always, feel free to not believe them, but this won't mean you are right.