What I was wondering for some time is why CDPR tends to release this huge patches with a ton of fixes. Why not release a fix a soon as it is ready and tested - sure we would probably be at verion 1.5235 now but who cares? In the end it would probably (at least from my point of view) be better for everyone involved, because quest fixes could be released way sooner (they won't make your witcher CTD), whereas engine fixes or improvements could be tested more thouroughly. If a particular feature causes problems it could be tested for 3 months or even half a year since it is not going to hold other things back.

One reason for fewer and larger patches could be consoles. Maybe Microsoft or Sony would not want to test so many small patches, but in that case CDPR could wait until enough fixes have piled up and release every X fixes as one bigger patch.

Or am I missing something enitrely?

Hmm, hmm-and hmm. I may be speaking absolute cr@p, but maybe every patch comes with a piece of software
to stop pirates from acquring it. And this piece of software is big, so that it is only implemented only once in a big patch,
instead of being used 500 times in many patches.... Again, I may be(probably am) wrong, so correct me if I am.

but people still pirate it anyway, don't they?

You mean the patches specifically?

No, I meant that there is a piece of software in the patch that stops people from being able to take the PATCH and putting it on cracked games.

I think I've heard that Witcher patches can be applied to their games without any problems?

Not sure. But that was just a quick idea that I came up with in a minute or two.

Big patches are easier to manage than a ton of small, incremental ones. What CDP does is fix all the errors they know of, while all the errors they have fixed are being tested in the meantime, along with their interactions with other fixes (...kinda). Either when everything is fixed or quite simply within a reasonable timeframe, they release a patch and see how do various versions of people's games react to this. If no new errors appear, great, when they do - well, they get reported, studied, replicated, fixed and tested again while CD Project knows exactly which changes they did with the last patch they have released.

With small, incremental patches, this process gets a fair bit more chaotic. That's not to say it's impossible to manage and I'm sure some games do this, but there aren't many such games. We also have no clue how much effort does packaging a patch for Steam, Galaxy and DRM-free release take, doing this as little as possible is most likely a reason too. If anything, big patches make it easier for pirates to constantly keep the game updated as they only have to crack an update every so often. If new versions came out every other day, they'd have a hard time keeping up.