Sorry it took me longer than expected to get back to, but there is no holiday season here, so hectic life is hectic.

Anyway, more advice before getting to the piece itself: This piece was long. Probably a tad too long for this sort of site. I'd recommend in the future cutting these long pieces into 2-3 pieces themselves. This piece was 3.2k words, and while I too write such pieces, you also need to know your audience.

I'd also recommend you sharing your experience on gamasutra. No, you won't get (potentially!) paid for it, but the audience there was formed around this type of content, so you might get more actual discussion and feedback.

Now, consumables do need to be a vast minority, because they give the impression of pay to win, or even pay-to-have-fun. They're the sort of thing that reward skinner-box design, and you pay not to have fun, but to remove the drip-feed status. Yes, it makes design harder, but... yeah.

Your monetization model strikes me closest to how MOBAs work. You even released heroes and such. Even if the gameplay itself was an ARPG, your game was made like a MOBA. So, how do MOBAs earn money? The constant churning of permanent content is one way. The other is attracting new players. If you don't grow, you die out, they say in many businesses, and it definitely seems the case with such games.

"But wait, shouldn't the focus be keeping your current players?" you rightfully ask, and it is, but you need new players to also keep your older players. The game has to grow to keep what it already has. Stressful.

Which brings us to the monthly cadence and the approval problem. A perfect situation would have you 3-4 months ahead of schedule. So even if the hero that's to be released in 3 months runs into approval issues, you still have time to deal with it, or a way to bump the hero behind it ahead of schedule.
But it's not easy for a small studio basically working on 1-2 next heroes. Heck, even I find it hard to schedule posts in advance, rather than just write and immediately post!

Good post.