I see this more as a rebalance of mechanics and more stuff to grind for. If you enjoyed your time in the swamps now you can go back and farm more iron for a prison to hold all the gold you don't need.
The food/stamina rebalance makes it so you will need to upgrade your armor to a higher tier to explores the new areas because you will use your food for stamina.

it's a weird change considering you can swing your weapon a few times without any buffs.
I see why they did it but now you need to play with 5 people for about 10-20 hours to build all the new stuff

Also the new building material is just tedious to get for cosmetic purposes. The food recipes seem to mostly use some of the unsed materials.

Ok, so what's the big issues at hand? The game released in early acces with 4 extra biomes(deep north, ashlands, mistlands and ocean) that were not really used.
So in 8 months they didnt even touch these 4 biomes because they wanted to introduce more cosmetic changes?
It's a team of 10 people, most indie teams have less than that and finish games.
I am not saying they are moving slow, i am saying they are not following their own plans or their vision for the game.
Imagine that, they release the areas with the early acces program but then they delay the first update and don't touch the areas.
So now it seems i was right, the only reason i didnt play this at release was because i thought this would never get finished. It seems i was right, the release will be in 2023 at best or they might pull a battle brothers and release the game and say "it's done".

The main point is that budget or time doesn't mean a game will get done, they can sit on 20 million dollars and still delay updates or new content.