You should take that up with Larian, they manage the timing of their updates.

Yes and no. It is indeed an issue that must be taken into consideration with the GOG platform itself. Of course game devs are not going to prioritize GOG, it's a tiny userbase. That means delayed patch releases will happen almost always. Larian has actually been pretty good, many companies are much much worse (including skipping entire patches or in some cases not even releasing some of their DLC at all on GOG).

While this isn't GOG's "fault" necessarily, it is never the less a "problem" with choosing GOG that people must be aware of and consider. I always try to go with GOG just to support them and also to try and maintain some diversity of platform in my library just in case of an outage some day. That being said, I did learn a long time ago not to go GOG for anything I intend to play multiplayer because mismatched versions always breaks multiplayer and GOG patches are always delayed.

Letting go of GOG now will only ensure it will be the more a second class citizen in the future instead of the plattform, the only one btw. that is, where you own your game files and can play offline.

That may come with a slight inconvenience but you should weight the pros and cons.

If you leave you agree to own nothing forever!

I think for a newly released multiplayer game, having everyone on the same platform will unfortunately give the best experience.

For single player games and older, stable multiplayer games, GOG, despite some occasional issues, still has the huge DRM free advantage. I've had to replace/reorganize my hard drives a few times and being able to install games from my USB drive instead of re-downloading them is a huge benefit. Whereas other platforms treat legitimate customers like criminals based on the behavior of the criminal minority, GOG lets you own your games.

Giving a monopoly to one distributor is bad for gamers.

Wow, a whole 2 hours? For a game that will probably still be worth playing 20 years from now. I hear PS5 is waiting longer than 2 hours. XBOX is really taking a long time.

If you gave up after 2 hours for a baby hotfix then do that. You don't have to announce it like anyone actually cares what you decided to do.

I bought the game but have decided to just wait on playing it for a month or two when things have settled because it's not like there's nothing else to play and I feel no urgency to complete this one.

That said it does seem up to date w/ Hotfix 2.1 even on the offline installer via patch. Of course you gave up so it doesn't matter.