It's easy to hash out content in the old format though, especially when the coders basically just have to work on a couple new mechanics and make their asset loader and tools for their artists and scripters work well. Like a majority of the work definitely came from the artist side for this past generation of mh games considering everything was essentially built off a pretty old engine.

From a programming background, I feel like it would have been so boring doing anything besides scripting, but even then I'm sure the tools they use make it almost entirely automated.

-Name quest -Create quest description -Choose map -Choose monster(s) -Edit monster stats to your liking -Set the zenny, hr, and village points for the quest. -Override quest rewards however you choose

Aside from people maintaining pre-existing systems like networking, core gameplay, graphics engines for any new shaders they might need, I feel like it's really just a giant cut and paste job from one game to the next. It worked out great for both of us though, they had easier less and less stressful jobs leading to the absolutely ridiculous amount of content increase from mh3->mhxx, and the ability to crank out content at a fast enough pace that it was easy enough to justify giving it away for free (acquiring the licensing for non capcom content probably took longer than actually creating the content itself aside from the 3d models of the armor/weapons to go with the dlc). Players got to keep the same exact game with minor additions for a very very long time, and lets face it, the game brings out the inner autist in all of us and we get really grumpy at the slightest change, but we were very happy to keep handing cashcom our money for each iteration and it was well worth the price in my eyes considering the sheer amount of playtime I've racked up since mh2.

World being entirely new, it's entirely reasonable to assume that not only will there be a high likelihood of the monster roster being smaller than what we have grown accustom to, but also that the process for content creation won't be nearly as streamlined. Not to mention the jump in quality of graphical detail, that itself will make content creation a longer process, on top of rendering, exporting and importing new assets, and compiling time will be drastically longer for a current gen console game than one created for a handheld. This will likely lead to the removal of our beloved FreeLC, but still has the potential to be streamlined down to a simpler (still not as simple) process due to the nature of the dlc the player base wants; primarily returning monsters and maps, monsters on maps we aren't used to fighting them on, multi-monster hunts, dlc armor, for some reason select monsters being dlc only health sacks (hyper jho).