SW development often involves working on multiple branches; if some fixes (like the ones in 1.26) are ready for release, my view is that it's better to release those than wait for integration of possibly larger feature sets and thus delay small (or maybe for some: very important) bug fixes. There are countless examples of monolithic systems with long periods between releases, and even sometimes every new feature introduce many additional stability issues, etc. It looks like Nord is instead trying to stabilise and close bugs, which means the SW is maturing. Adding new features is probably also better done onto a mature base than one that has many bugs or issues.
Thus, the fact that Nord can release bug fixes in a steady stream of releases is in my book only positive. We don't know what else they are working on and what the state is of those issue, but the fixes that come out do not necessarily mean they are not also working on some other things. Fixes to be done on e.g. the organ side might impact only some parts of the SW, and when deciding to do a release, maybe that part is/was not ready yet, and hence didn't make it in time for integration, testing and release?
I can understand that there are some people that lack certain features that either was expected (Sample Editor) or has been removed (Dual KB Panel Mode), but as has been pointed out, we don't use our boards in identical ways. I don't personally use Dual KB Panel mode at all, so for me (and possibly also many others), the NS3 is working really well, and I use it daily and have had NO hiccups or problems with my board in live playing etc. And for those that have had problems with the board (not booting up, MIDI issues, ...) maybe 1.26 has fixed some of these.
So it's hardly a useless release. Why not let those that will benefit from the release enjoy it instead of being envious