Thank you for the questions, it's fun to see so much curiosity! As for the answers:
Development questions
1. There won't be any more content that makes the game longer in terms of in-game time. It will always end after five years
2. We won't add any characters or buildings, but we will add a few main events. There were some we didn't have time to add before release (like ensuring that all townsfolk have 2 meetup events, and having some small events where foreign leaders you are allied with request something of you). We also have ideas for a few "regular" short and long main events that we plan to add sometime in the future. Although, none of this content will be playable this year
3. We already have a pretty good idea of the next game we're going to make. It won't have any sort of connection to Mistwinter Bay, will be a completely different genre (although still pretty centered around characters, most likely) and much smaller, which is good for both our mental health and the development time. That's all we can say about it at the moment. We might return to the world of Sefra in another game at some point, though - we deliberately designed the game world so that it would be easy to build on the lore and have other games take place in it!
4. Besides the short events where you buy a horse or find a kitten, we don't think we'll add any sort of animal for the sovereign. At the very least, it won't be anything that requires any sort of new mechanic
5. No, it unfortunately won't get animations. There are simply too many characters and animating them would require too many graphical assets (we have already been struggling with optimizing the game with the existing, static images) or complex code that is simply beyond our coding level. None of us are that experienced with 2D animations either, so even if we tried to animate it, it probably wouldn't do much good for the general gameplay experience
6. As you suspect, a spinoff with any of the adoptable children won't happen. We don't know what a game like that would be about. Also, since there are four children, all of them would need the same amount of attention, which would mean a lot of work even for a small project
Personal questions
1. Since we are two people working on the game, we have different opinions of who we like and why. For one of us, the favorite townspeople are Gale, Dough and Amelie (probably because they were written by her). For the other, there are a few for very different reasons, like Erewen, Zane, Ulvar, Te'Rohga, Kieran. But none of us really have a singular favorite and we like all of them for one reason or another
2. One of us isn't fond of Celia because of her personality, and the other doesn't like Amelie and Eugene (because they were annoying to implement haha). Of course, as developers, we don't really dislike any character, townsperson or not, since we added them to the game for specific reasons. Even if they aren't characters we would have pursued romantically etc if we were players, we made them since we knew someone would want to do that, and that's a big point of the game - to have a bunch of different characters so that there's hopefully at least one who every player finds interesting!
3. For one of us, it's Orreg. For the other, it's Llemyon, but Gaird has a really interesting story lore wise
4. If we have to choose, one of us picks Camilla and the other Eria (for the same reasons you mentioned)
We hope those are satisfying answers that satiated your curiosity! Thanks for enjoying the game!