Despite the pushback and the OSRS gold back-peddling, it felt like both games did kind of transition to an expansion version of a few bigger updates a year.
But looking forward to 2021 and the launch programs, it feels like OSRS has broken away from that and back to the older system of a lot of varying size upgrades even when they still do hype up the beginning of season, summer, and fall releases.
Anywho, that was all a very long and drawn out way to get to say I think RS3 is still focusing more on a few large upgrades, and without polls and blogs in the openings, the focus instead is on the MTX promos making it feel much worse.
I hope that RS3 will be able to make at least a little of a bounce back and get out of this slump it seems to have dropped in since approximately Menaphos. Perhaps it's wishful thinking to hope that every one of the alterations to the OSRS Team this season might also mean more inner stuff has happened on RS3's conclusion to going into 2021.
After that drought of content following Archaeology, they did develop and have done a decent job to keep a proper cadence for Cheap Runescape gold upgrades (first week and third week of the month are patches, 2nd week is QOL, and the last week is a content update). Like you mentioned, I'm glad both games have seemed to move away from that expansion model. It doesn't work well in either game IMO.
