...
This is poor game design at its worst, locking content behind pointless achievements that 99% of the player base will never see.
... look, I already know you stated your distaste earlier regarding Mr. Qi (which is fine and had some good arguments to it), but let's be honest about the enduring content locked behind all of this. It's:
The Statue of True Perfection
the ??? Mask
golden chickens
... and that's kind of it? All of those are cute, but none of them are particularly game changing. I feel like the bigger tragedy of the update is the ostriches, since they are locked behind completing professor snail's museum and is easily part of the worst and least interesting grind in the game (waiting for that god awful mummified bat to drop). Ostrich eggs didn't really need a special incubator, and its inclusion feels like just another way to pad out the crafting recipes. I guess you could argue that this is the same issue as with the golden chickens, but at least the chickens are effectively just palette recolours. I don't know, I guess I am just sad I probably will never make a casual ostrich farm simply because revisiting the ginger volcano for +2 game years to get the stupid bat is so far above and beyond the effort needed to get even a dino farm going.
Perhaps the biggest beef I have is actually just with the name of the Statue of True Perfection. While it's a touch redundant at that point since you'll already have gotten dozens of prismatic shards and likely not have much use other than converting them into candy, the name does feel like a rub on all those who could just be happy getting the best grandpa results at the end of year 2. Perhaps just changing it to something like "Statue of Ample Abundance" might go a ways in shifting the tone of the thing - among other things, it feels more accurate (and if there's ever more updates, the goalposts for "perfection" might just shift again and... yeah).
There's plenty of new stuff without needing to do all of that, and it's fine to have some things for the people who have put hundreds of hours in.
And at the end of the day, toma02 isn't a person who can fix that. They just want to be able to enjoy/celebrate that they got it done. You might be better served by contacting ConcernedApe directly for the constructive criticism.