They don't invest any development resources into anything except the next patch. They are currently working on 7.4, 7.5 and 8.0. They don't have approval to work on anything else and that includes spending a few hours adding an if check to see if anyone is new before forcing cutscenes. The only exceptions are the Graphics Update (which they seem to have silently abandoned), the revamp of a sidequest dungeon, and 5 QoL improvements out of the pool of thousands similar to the ones you brought up.

There seems to be no understanding of how not working more on the past systems is contributing to bleeding players.