It's not the fixing that takes the 8 months. they don't need something solely on people's tears. They look at the stats of the weapons they need to decide what changes to make without ruining the weapon and keeping it on par with everything else. Once they do that they need to make sure it was changed without ruining the gun or messing up something else and if so restart. If not they then decide a patch release date and then release it. Something as simple as making the book required to be owned to get/use the rewards is no where near as tedious.