I also remember that it was the publicly given reason. Did some digging and found the relevant thread.
I have little doubt that Salty’s statement is inaccurate and is truthful regarding the art issue.
That said, I’m considerably more skeptical that the art issue was the only issue at play here throughout the development cycle for the update. For followers of Taransworld, art assets in the game file were a generally reliable proxy for when an update had to be released onto the production servers. I seriously doubt that the devs did not know this either, especially since that proxy was openly discussed on the forums by players. It would be an easy low-hanging fruit for the devs to present to players to cover the issue. After all, they probably were not telling an false statement here. The art issue likely did happen. Did they need to provide any more evidence to the public than that a delay occured to be convincing?
As a formal statement, no, and they very likely never will as a matter of policy. There is no reason for them to do that. At best we get indirect references to developmental changes, such as comments like the development schedule is fluid and always subject to change, and so on either on the forums on on the weekly streams. The public doesn’t get to see what’s in the game’s developmental plans and the devs are never going to be obligated to show them to the public either.
So, yes, in the lack of a formal statement from the devs on the matter, all that remains is speculated probability. And if I think really, really, hard, I believe there was some someone who posted somewhere on the forums here that they thought the update was satisfying and complete, which would technically invalidate the “all” statement claim. I’ll modify that sentence to resolve that possibility.