Small patches are fine. It's rather the cadence of content. There is a series of interviews with Warframe devs and managers about different aspects by noclip. I think DE's approach worked mostly quite well. I think it's the interview with Ford, but I'm not sure - the series is quite interesting as a whole.I think that FD have suffered from this model of delivering content in small patches. A large patch is likely to have at least some content that will suit all players. In addition I think FD are pretty good at development planning. ie I think they know what they can do in a period of time. This is good from a cost control perspective, but tends to result in designs being abridged and is particularly noticeable in short length development cycles. If you look at everything since the initial release of Horizons, it's felt like each piece is incomplete. The other big issues is that Engineers has created too big a combat gap between the haves and have not's.
The game would benefit from creating a clear structure of player-squadron-faction-power-super power with Thargoids as a super power. A player joins a squadron or a faction. When a player belongs to a faction/squadron they only see missions for that faction and they are automatically in Powerplay. Powerplay activities become mission types. All mission types confer merits, but Powerplay specific mission types confer more merits and are only available when in open, moving out of open fails the open mission. Players not belonging to a squadron or faction can do none PP missions, but their actions have zero impact on the faction/power it's merely a cash/material transaction and confers no PP merits. I also believe a subset of open missions should be available to be done in stock ships or with free insurance to encourage players into open.