Hello! Thank you for your wonderful comment. I'm always glad when I hear from someone who played the ruthless content and understood why we put it.
Now, 0.4 did not add new content to the ruthless route. This was a conscious choice, and the reason is that the next piece of content for it contains information which would spoil 0.5. To make it work as we intended it can only be published when we get to a specific point of the story.
To give you an analogy, we didn't intend on the ruthless content being as long as the regular route... Instead we went at it with the premise going all-out, no holds barred in terms of writing style. We are more creative with how the content is written, we exercise a bit more of our stylistic skills, we show more of our cards. It's meant to reveal a whole other side to Asterion, to show what are the consequences of mistreating someone. So we won't remove the ruthless route. I'd say removing it would be akin to removing an important part of Asterion's character.
But it is going towards an end, yes, and we still need more time to make it work. It's going to be intense.
I'd like to hear from you again when we release 0.5 to see what you think of it, and to gather more suggestions on how we could make the whole thing flow better and more coherently. Right now our focus is writing new content, but after 0.5 is done I'd like to do some editing to perfect previous sections of the story.
Thank you for your wonderfully thoughtful comment.
(Edited to expand a bit, because I was sleepy when I wrote this comment.)