Hey, I like the new nice writing style. I can't promise you'll get an official answer from Caribdis, but I'll try, maybe that's enough.
(EDIT: I'll try answering your questions is what I meant)
1. I'm not sure why this release takes longer but my best informed guesses would be the winter holidays and an increased amount of animations in this release. Also, the releases tend to get larger, so the the development time tends to increase as well.
2 & 3. First of all, some people just want notifications when there's a new release since they're following a lot of devs. To reduce spam, development updates are separated from release updates.
Also, this project is free and entirely financed by donations. As you might now, Patreon subscriptions are generally more expensive than buying the game at value, so as an exclusive extra, you get to be part of the development process. This is another reason why these updates are separated.
Caribdis could put the progress banner on the game page, maybe he'll even do it if you ask nicely. Though the absence of it does act like a reverse-advertisement: If this project interests you, you're encouraged to dig deeper and maybe even get a subscription. Though right now, you can still access it for free anyway on Discord and Subscribestar.