It's not typical to take this long.
When I became a part of the project and team, what you saw on the promotional pics was what was going to be released, then things happened with RS, as time went on the team decided to up their game from the previous MGS figures so we began doing some small adjustments which then snowballed into a complete overhaul, not only because we knew it would be worth it but some aspects of the inital prototype proved to be troublesome, such as the body, the likeness wasn't 100% there, the hair system was a nightmare to cast, the clothes weren't completely accurate, etc.
Then the pandemic hit and factories were closed for a while, which forced us to stay at home and in turn closely examine the figure and tweak it further, it was then we also decided to do a completely new 1/6 scale strong body, this meant having to sculpt and cast all the parts for it, which would lead us to another bump in the road, the mold factories we were working with weren't the best, not the best quality and too slow, so we had to look for and move production of all our stuff to other, better factories, which will help us release future products faster.
Going back to the figure itself, we have been improving and tweaking it until now, if there's something to be improved then we'll do it, and I don't regret it one bit because the expirience and skills we've learned in this period of time will be invaluable in future projects, I don't want to sound biased but I know the quality of the team's work and my work and what we've managed to achieve is going to blow people away and show those that still view third party figures as cheap KOs what can be done when people are passionate about what they're doing, I'm a collector like all of you and being apart of this has been a dream come true, I wholeheartdly believe nobody could've done justice to this character and franchise like we have.