All the things you listed are not givens or actual, tangible direct results of a new race. All of that is covered by adding new Jobs and content every Expansion. That gets people to come back and play the game seeing as if you're not interested in playing the game and dropped it you're prob not gonna come back just to run around with a new race and do nothing you.
Adding a new race is the most expensive cosmetic addition you can bring to games like this which is why, again, this is the last time it's gonna happen according to them ... and it's not even a common occurrence in today's MMOs. Cause it's not a profitable endeavor in and of it self when considering how much time and money goes into it and how much time and work it adds to the development of new content.
If you already buy potions on a whim then you're already buying potions, you don't need a new race to convince you to buy one. Same with buying glam. If you buy Glam from the mogstation after you, on a whim, change body types then you are all ready doing everything you seem to credit a new race with causing.
They have openly said that they started work on the new races shortly after the start of SB and only got them to a presentable state shortly before their reveals. They've even clearly been working on the post reveal given the polish we've seen compared to past renders. So yeah, it takes them a whole expansion to come out.Two years of development of a race? I don't believe it literally takes them two years. It takes them two years with the current workload they have and juggling everything around. And Viera females were created in a much shorter time frame. They most likely do not have a static team that works justs on armour sets all the time. They have to juggle. So let's not exaggerate and put the idea into folks heads that for two whole years everyone is feverishly working on the race with little time for nothing else. This was probably not your intention anywho, but you know how people are.
That's from concept to finished product. These things progress in stages, certain things have to be done first before others can.
They can assign a concept artist to come up with the designs for the race and then once they finish nailing down the art through meetings with the director they move on to something else. Then that art can move on to modeling/ rigging/ textures. Through meeting with the director they come to an agreement on the model ... and there's animation. The animators would need at least a proxy rig of what the race would look like to start animating and once they do it's a process of figuring out how you want them to live and be in this world as well as meeting with the director to get approval (like how Yoshi had to stop the animators working on the Dancer animations because he felt the movements were becoming too gendered/ sexual and at some point they would have to make different animations for the both genders. Animators need guidance and over sight to). Through out this the modelers would have to be going back to fix everything to this body model and people would have to text it so that all the gear works right.
These are all people who could be doing something else at that time and the development of the new race could take that long uninterrupted.
This is such an odd thing to say.Honestly, if you took out all the juggling and what not, the team could probably push out male Viera and female Hrothgar in a month or two - probably in between. Not including quality control. Not that they should do this, but yeah...