>>531226043
We've got one (1) patch to go and we still haven't even finished up the statue of the seven or the regional sigil tree, and that's on top of us not having a map with its own special collectibles like the Chenyu carps, Chasm Lumenstones etc.
Similarly the structure in the data suggests they wrote or at least finished the 5.2 interlude with Iansan after they had finished the 5.3 archon quest finale despite 5.2 being a non-AQ patch being announced in the stream they did before Natlan even came out
I wouldn't be surprised if they had some severe scheduling issues at some point but chances are we'll never know what exactly happened. If you want to be optimistic then maybe they were just allocating additional manpower to Nod-Krai