One sec, let me just post the audio file of the bug I hid in Square's offices As I said in my post, the season pass specifically advertising these episodes was announced before the game was released. The story was obviously shaped to fit the DLCs in too as Wolf Kanno pointed out. If you haven't played it, there are events in the story where they arbitrarily split the party up with little reason, and they all return with a "Oh I'll tell you about it later" nod and a wink. If you want to believe in the wholesome honest nature of Square-Enix then I don't have the heart to try to convince you otherwise, but most people who played the game have probably reached the same conclusion that I did.Are you sure you did? Unless you got the Premium Edition (and you would have to have paid more for it) the Episode DLC is not part of a pre-order.
Anyway, with that said, I don't want to be too harsh. The Assassin's Festival and a couple of other bits were free which is great. I do agree with Wolf Kanno though that they definitely refined the gameplay mechanics of this content in the interim though and probably added some polish. I wasn't really blown away by the unique gameplay in any of them though and was more interested in the episodes for the story content.
I also think these new episodes are more palatable. Maybe I'm being naive but I think they're all new ideas and concepts that they've had after launch, rather than chopping and changing the main story to shoehorn them in.