I think that food system will be rewritten as a prelude to the economy arc (as it is, most villages are based on food production). So it will be likely to stay as it is for a long time.
I think that the slowed progress from Toady for the last 2 months (except from the conferences) has been caused by the complexity of Artifacts handling. All of this is based on "reactions". How will an observator understand what he is seeing ? And based on which knowledge ? If someone is seeing you with an artifact there are so many possibilities and interpretations that it will be very hard to create a good system.
But when it will be done, it will be surely very interesting.
I think its great that he spends the needed ammount of time on that. Its an important and complex mechanic that will be used a lot in the future, so he does the right thing in spending time carefully designing it
Its something like the combat system. Yeah, it has aged a lot from previous versions(the most recent stuff being force translation), and we definitely want it to get more complex and interesting, but the whole premise must've been the result of spending a lot of time thinking about it, so it works right and can expand and get more complex in the future without problems
I don't know, when he takes so much time on an update, I like to think that he is spending the extra time to make it better