Soap writers often engage in long-running lots that have an eventual 'pay off' - the seriously big pay offs are saved for Christmas Day.
The risk with long-running stories is that they can fail to engage the viewers' attention in volumes commensurate with the length of time they take to spin out.
That's the risk of soap writing, and they don;t always get it right - the problem is, because eveyrhing is shot about two months in advance, by the time they realise that a story is failing to gather interest, it's too late because it's off and running, and will bore/ annoy viewers for another seven or eight weeks, and if your soap goes out three nights a week, that's a long time to be annoying your faithful audience!
But if things are seriously off the rails, they usually make adjustments to bring forward the pay-off, or change the direction, of the story line, so hang on in there, it will get better, or change, maybe both.