I read your entire post, but I'll just respond to your summary.
Using your Agile project management experience to explain a typical software development process to non software developers is a good idea, as it gives them an inkling into one of the ways that software projects are managed. (It's not the only way and there are many variations of it as well, for you non SW devs).
But in the end you are just guessing like the rest of us, you don't know whether offline mode was deprioritised late in the project cycle, scrapped half way through, trialled early on and dismissed or never even attempted. (I personally have faith in FD that it was as you suggest, but I am also a realist).
Using words like pandered gives the impression that you are pushing a MP agenda over the offline experience, of course FD have to make hard decisions when faced with the reality of what features to drop for release, but the reality now is that a significant, (where significant is >1), number of people now will NOT be able to play the game.
This is not pandering, it is not a trivial feature, it is not bells and whistles, it is not an elitist vocal minority request for a non foundation feature, it is a failing of the game to even function at a bare minimum for a certain percentage of it's already paid up users.
You can not and should not sugar coat this situation with:
- they may still be working on offline, it's just been deprioritised.
- they had to drop some features and MP was more important than offline.
- relasing ED with offline mode would delay the release for all users.
The reality is that now the game is broken for certain users; those who are not effected, mostly do not understand and mostly do not care and what's worse try and justify the decision, there is no justification, it's broken.
