Its hard to turn a ship this big, and to recreate from new what has been status quo for so long, ie Bodypaint and the underlying mechanics of the theory of how Cinema architecture was built a dozen years ago. Changing that base architecture isn't easy, and the more that depends on it makes it near impossible to revamp sections that need updating. One of the reasons that other apps (3dsmax I'm looking at you) rely so heavily on plugins for core functionality for users.
If modeling is your main thing, then Cinema hasn't been and should not have been your tool of choice for a while. They have made huge improvements but modelling has not been the #1 reason the software exists.
It appears to me that Cinema is beginning to get more and more like Photoshop. The feature set is so huge that it is hard to rationalize a single person making use of all of it. Sure there are the power users that will, and will ask for more. But in the small C4D community that I live in, just like PS, we use 20% of what Cinema can do, and if it can't do it we find another tool that can. Our workflow is already set for the next 5 years, and it doesn't include C4D in the render pipeline, just the scene building and dynamics once in a great while. But now that they finally got up to speed (sort of) with the CAD file import and export, my life will be much easier! That alone is worth the price of the MSA update for me.
All the node stuff looks super cool, and I'm sure I will pyne at the idea of figuring it out, but I already do node based materials in other render engines.