Hohooow, what a beautiful reply!
Sometimes it's good to end of a story; bring a conclusion, or maybe just a season epilogue. It gives people a break from some constant, ongoing in-game struggles and creates opportunity to change perspective by using a whole new character. Three or four years is kinda big, I guess. My own D&D setting is created since 5th edition has announced. I guess it was autumn 2014, and we played 2.5 storyline on it, but there's a huge leap between the start points, couldn't spend whole 7 years to the game. And it feels like I never run those games. Now I'm re-creating and improving everything I started years ago, on Fantasy Grounds Unity, hoping I could run my games on my very own setting once again.
About painting... I only painted three 3x3 square dungeon-ground foams to a certain grayish colour. That's all my experience. But I got some different type of brushes back then, and they're still with me. I asked Reaper if they could send any additional minis to me. I'm not sure if they're okay with that, but if I could have any similar minis, I will definitely try that 1-year-improvement comparing, for sure! And thank you for the blog link, I will definitely check it out.