Doing old art means I won't have current art and my recent approach to the game is I want to have sprites for the newest events. Whenever one of my artist will have some free time to fill one of the lacking sprites we are going to do it.
On icons work a separate artist who was feeling more comfortable with items like fruits/potions than an equipment itself, that's why those were handled first. He is slowly starting to work on equipment, so there will be more and more of them in time.
And those artist have their own lives, their own projects, they can only give me that much every month.