I think it’s a balance - this is a huge undertaking and unless we want to wait until 2025 for release date they need to get on with making the game.EAis a testing ground and in my experience after 250 hours is a really good one - we give feedback, get panel from hell every so often - that’s enough for me.
Why would community engagement make the EA process take significantly longer? Hire a single person to post tweets, do reddit AMAs, post on the forums, etc. Obviously they'll take some time away from development from talking to the devs, but I doubt this is significant on the grand scale of things. Maybe a month or two delay which is ~nothing over the course of 3+ years.
The Panels from Hell (aside from being bad) likely take up way more time and resources away from development than a community engagement spokesperson posting ~weekly tweets and ~bi-monthly twitch/reddit/forum Q&As would.
