How Long Should UI/Features Take?

The striking thing about Rift's beta events is how rapidly the developers have been adding things in response to player feedback.  Are they demonstrating remarkable adaptability, or have we as players allowed the industry to get too complacent about the time they can take to improve their products? 

Things that have changed in the week and a half since the last build include:

• Addition of a badly needed public grouping system to go with the rift/invasion system (which drops group content on players who might not be grouped)
• Consolidation of Rift currency tokens
• A new character sheet that will, in the future, store titles, mounts, and collections

From the outside, we can't be sure which of these features were already in the works (e.g. because they weren't ready for testing) and which were actually implemented in the last two weeks.  All of the above are major quality of life issues that have been addressed in Rift's various competitors for years now.  Perhaps deliberately opening the beta without these items was an intentional marketing move intended to impress the community with Trion's responsiveness.  (They've got Pete convinced that they're now too responsive.)

Then again, how hard were any of these changes?  The public group button is elegant in its functionality (and superior to Mythic's original version - e.g. automatically merging two groups if space permits), but all it really does is expand traditional raid assistant group inviting privileges to anyone who happens to be nearby.  Fan UI modders routinely create things like reorganized character sheet skins rapidly, and without being paid to do so.  Consolidating storage is not something that players can do, but turning physical items into spells or lines of character sheet data actually saves server space, because at least the game no longer needs to store which bagslot the item is stored in. 

It's just interesting to me that we don't think twice when something like a mount storage panel is a major announced feature of a quarterly patch in another MMO, but Trion somehow drops it in somewhere between betas.  Have they really built an infrastructure that is so much faster and more responsive?  Or are we routinely waiting months for other studios to patch in days worth of work?