Hey, I will answer this thread as the leader of the mapper team because I wont accept accusations in that form based on uninformed assumptions.
First of all I would like to clarify that its not the devs who are working on content, instead there are different staff roles like Scripters, Artists, Mappers, Testers that are required for content projects like Astrella and any other content addition. Many resources, work and time is required from these different teams.
We are not a company with a set employee count and worktime, instead we are regular people who have their own real jobs, school, studies etc., with families, children, hobbys and other interests., we are working for free and in our own free time, next to all IRL-responsibilities to provide PRO more content. Anyone out of the different content-teams could have less time for any reason at any moment or anyone could also leave the staff team completly for more important matters in their real life.
That is why it is really hard or rather impossible to predict how long a project like that may take and to give updates about the project in general without either leaking more than we want to or to give the community false hope. We have to take so many different factors in mind, so in the end giving updates about the project would just make the situation worse.
I understand the players frustration on this but you also have to keep in mind that Astrella was passed through so many different staff members already, many left and many joined. It is not easy at all to keep track of a project like that unfortunately, we are trying our best though. The fact that it was announced this early was obviously a mistake back then and the content-team suffers from it a lot as the playerbase was expecting it soon, leading to many comments that can de-motivate anyone working on it.
The people who are currently working on Astrella are the ones you are blaming but we werent the ones to announce it or built hype around it, instead we are the ones trying to save the project and bring it to the players regardless of anything else. We were short-staffed, presented with low free-time or other unforseen events a lot over the last few years and it was and is still hard to meet the expectations of the playerbase. It is hard to release new content for events and content in general (new forms, mounts, cosmetics etc. from artists, new maps from mappers, new quests from scripters etc.) every year while still working on a big project like Astrella which requires full focus usually. As you probably noticed in the past, we skipped some event-content releases to focus more on Astrella but there was still other stuff we released, however I can assure you that the progress on Astrella didnt suffer from that, we only worked on other things if we couldnt work on Astrella for some time for different reasons (resources needed from another team first for example). Many things had to be reworked as well because it was simply outdated or wasnt correct (story- and map-wise for example).
Personally speaking I am looking forward to still put my time, love and effort into this project, together with the others from the content-team. Astrella is the main focus for the coming time but please try to understand the current content-team for all the things I explained in this message.