A lot of game devs meet player feedback with the preconception that their personal thoughts on game systems override those of players, because "they aren't making the game, so their feedback is worth less than those who do", and as a result many feel justifying their changes is unnecessary. This is, for obvious reasons, entirely missing the point of player feedback and a very unhealthy stance to take with your community (it practically guarantees an increase in hostile player feedback because cordial feedback is ignored, for one).
This often manifests in a general unwillingness to communicate, which is compounded by unwillingness that is artificially created by things like employee NDAs/non-compete contracts. There are a lot of unfortunate pressures within a corporation working against actually responding to and considering feedback.
Larian's obsession with telemetry suggests to me that those pressures have won out in their internal corporate culture, and they resort to anonymous data gathering as the primary/solitary source of 'feedback' they actually consider, but the early access model requires at least a veneer of accepting feedback because part of what you're selling is player involvement in the development process (whether you officially admit it or not). Protip, Larian: telemetry alone is not feedback - collecting all the stats in the game tells you almost nothing useful if the game those stats were collected from is incomplete. Collecting stats from your existing incomplete product is, however, an extremely effective way to create the delusion that simply regurgitating statistically meaningless stats from a deeply unfinished project counts as 'listening to players', and anyone who verbally disagrees with your decisions is 'just a troll' or 'doesn't understand the game'.
Game publishers suck at communication because corporations in general suck at it, often shooting themselves in the foot out of over-prioritization of legal protection (and dubiously legal wealth protection in the form of NDAs/non-compete contracts). Unfortunately, in order to have an effective Early Access phase, you need to be able to communicate well. It's gotten so bad in the games industry that sometimes I genuinely wonder if every game publisher marketing/PR department, along with much of their upper management, needs to just be purged and replaced.
IMO, the bottom line is something Wikipedia figured out years ago: always assume good faith before you assume anything else. Nobody gets mad at game companies because they don't want the product to be better - the people providing specific complaints (even ones about meta-issues like communication) and suggestions are doing so because they care about the quality of your work, and every time their issues are met with silence, you've done damage to the most engaged and invested parts of your community by saying in effect that their efforts to express their thoughts mean so little to you that they aren't even worth acknowledging. At the same time, every bit of information you provide about internal reasons for certain decisions allows those parts of your community to improve the relevance and specificity of the feedback. Truly functional feedback is not two one way streets - a street sending games to players and another street sending game telemetry from players to you - it's a collaborative effort that requires the game makers to have respect for the opinions and experiences of players at least as much as it requires players to respect the game makers' decisions. In a decade of watching the games industry, I've genuinely never seen a widespread lack of player respect for devs be a problem - on the contrary, players will bend over backwards to avoid putting any blame for even clear software errors on the devs, usually citing crunch/stress/mismanagement as the true culprit (they are also usually correct). Players assume good faith from devs so broadly and reliably it's incredible how often that simple idea serves as common ground for even vehemently arguing players - it'd be nice to see more game publishers reciprocate that respect when it comes to feedback, rather than continue to take the passion their players share with them completely for granted by making only the bare minimum effort to respond (or less).
