I hate to say it, but I’ve long since made the switch to FacetWP. It basically does nearly the same thing, but has a lot more features and modules, including the Load More. I still have a lot of sites that I built with S&F prior that I can’t go back and retrofit, so I need to keep my license active, but that’s really the only reason I continue it. It’s borderline embarrassing when I have to tell a client that such an ubiquitous feature is not available and we’d need to convert it to a different framework entirely just to get a simple load more button.
Yes, I’ve also been hearing the V3 promise for years. I think it’s just an excuse, personally. Why not version v2.5? This is clearly a highly requested feature, and I really fail to see how it would require an entire re-write of the plugin when infinite scroll works as intended.
Anyway, to any other users that are looking for a plugin that does what S&F does but has Load More functionality, I would encourage you to look at FacetWP as an alternative. While both plugins have strengths and weaknesses, it’s hard to find a lot of reasons at this point to continue with S&F until there’s some real movement on these feature requests.