Well, games are supposed to be fun. So adding a fun element is not a waste of time. Or we could say that all emotes are a waste of time because they don’t add to gameplay. I would not agree with that statement, though.

Of course the developers need to prioritize their time, but I don’t think there are any critical issues in the game that would’ve required an animator’s input to such an extent that they would’ve had no time to make something fun between important tasks.

As I said, developers don’t decide strategy.

It does feel like there are several directions in which the game is being pulled. It’s obvious that the monetization system has its own demands that takes a lot of developer resources, because that’s where the company sees its money coming from. But then there’s also the part that tries to achieve the developers’ vision of what the game should be like, as well as some efforts to add stuff requested by the community; and these latter two are the ones which seem to us as random updates, because they’re separate from the overall strategy (assuming there is one beyond “let’s leech as much money out of our consumers as possible”).