The fans are the ones making everything all about shipping, and sometimes the way they obsess over their ships can even distract other people from the actual plot.
Sentry is right, they have been rushing the story forward so they can get to the big plot points, which has messed up their writing. Though, I've also seen a theory that one of the things affecting the writing was Youtube, where Miles and Kerry were trying to write the episodes in a way where RWBY episodes wouldn't get de-monitized by Youtube. Obviously, that didn't work, so RWBY is one of the shows that they're primarily putting on their own website. Now that I think of it, that may be why they're suddenly including a lot of blood... They don't have to worry about what Youtube thinks anymore.
Anyway, so far, it looks like Volume 6 may be heavier on the plot than Volume 5 was, but we're only a couple episodes in, so time will tell.