YOOO LET’S GOOO I FOUND A CLUE, HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT:
The release date.
The 2.2.0 betas were released in late November. If it was a normal update, 2.2.0 would have been probably released by now. This delay makes me feel like @Dreamtonics is busy doing something big and important. Since many clues are here, it makes me think that the big project @Dreamtonics is busy working on, is a phoneme set and a G2P dictionary for French support. If this is true, it means one of these three things:
a) 2.2.0 will be released in January alongside this new voicebank, on a date that probably coïncides with NAMM 2026. - This update will add French support for the voicebank and will make it usable (without a functional “French” language option, the voicebank won’t work properly)
b) 2.2.0 will be released in December, with the French dictionary already included in it, so the new voicebank, if properly released, will already work in the new update. - This update will be an update, that can make the voicebank work properly with the correct French language option.
c) 2.2.0 will be released in December, but the French dictionary will be added in a later update, like 2.2.1 or 2.3.0 - This is much less likely, given that @Dreamtonics seems to be very busy currently, and that new languages are added in x.x.0 updates so a 2.2.1 French release is much less likely than a 2.2.1 bugfix for a French language option already added in 2.2.0
French is a language with spelling rules more complicated than Korean or Spanish (stuff like liaison, oral and nasal vowels with remarkably tiny differences in spelling but huge difference in pronunciation, dialectal phonemes that could come with a toggle option similar to Spanish’s “use European pronunciation”), so it makes sense that @Dreamtonics would be very busy designing a dictionary suited for this language.