The thing about the current state of development is that the game changes fast and by a quite big magnitude at times. The free version serves as a demo to showcase to the player what the game can and cannot do to help them decide whether they want to support it. As such it needs to be as representative as possible, so keeping it just one version behind might already not qualify, that's why I opted for the limited feature approach.
But I assume when the project reaches a certain maturity and enters a comfortable beta, where more content access is the main driver for a paid version. Then, it would make sense to switch to the delayed model :)
Cheers~!