It's cards close to chest time again.
Yes - but that's probably worked out
better for them than being more talkative would have.
If they'd revealed back in ~April that U14 would be "full scale Thargoid War" then by the time it was released in November players would have had so long to talk about it, suggest ways it could work which turned out not to resemble how it did, etc. that by the time it actually showed up everyone would be complaining it wasn't the Thargoid War they'd imagined.
As it is, they've released it as more or less a surprise, without critical bugs and with no more than the normal amount of major bugs, and it seems to have been the best release since at least Fleet Carriers or Beyond 3.3 for getting player interest up
after release day and getting positive conversations going on the forums about its content. Regardless, even the people who haven't been impressed with the Thargoid War, or just don't feel it's their sort of content, aren't criticisng it on the grounds that we weren't told it was coming sooner.
If it's good they don't need to hype it up in advance and if it's bad it doesn't help when they do, so they might as well keep quiet.
They explicitly said they were taking effort off console the ensure the PC version of the game got development, so that's the opposite of end of life.
Yep - the console support and Legacy in general being left behind only makes sense to bother with if there's an intent to keep doing some sort of development for the next few years. If not, just never quite admit (even to themselves) that console Odyssey isn't going to happen, and avoid the hassle of the Live/Legacy split too.
Which is not the same as there being "another Odyssey-sized piece of development as a major expansion" on their plans, of course.