Awesome, this dropped just as I was redoing a playthrough to trigger all I'd missed previously, right when I got to this new content showing up. Perfect timing.
All the new stuff is good and the outposts look like they'll help drain money (which previously started becoming a major non-issue by winter) so that's good.
I haven't managed to re-trigger the Ellie & Lucy scene yet with the latest build, but maybe I'm just missing some events in the sequence.
Added in post : I've had the event where Aillis talks about the workers to build outposts during the weekends but I still don't have the option to build the missing ones or upgrade existing ones while the merchants are there. Am I missing something? (I have enough gold to do either, too)
My only gripe has been with the Wizard Tower quest and the RNG galore that led to me fighting the same monster for over 3 weeks straight, at one point it took 8 nights in a row to get a single claw. It's just bad RNG luck but it managed to irritate a bit. Fighting the miniboss 5 times already sounded reasonable for a quest, upwards of 15 was uh... it didn't feel right.
Eventually, as more and more quests and POIs get added alongside, the drop odds of things like these could go up a little, just so you're not getting too screwed by unlucky RNG when there's many things to do. Currently it's not that big a deal though.
Keep up the fantastic work!