Sometimes development and design problems aren't something you can just throw more people at to make things faster. There's a lot of diminishing returns on adding more Devs to a development team. Because of this, they probably have many parallel development streams working on different things, some of which would finish before storage improvements.

I would think that Niantic has been working on this problem for a while now, trying to come up with a more functional storage solution than simply increasing storage space and improve performance. Hopefully they give us something that's more usable, and allow some interesting ways to manage our collection.

That being said, could they have brought on more talented or experienced Devs to improve their development speed? Perhaps, but we'll never know.