2021 was when it was announced an ingame feature would get a major rework.
2022, wasn't it? I don't recall it being mentioned before
this post in May unless I missed something really obvious.
(It's still been a while since the last update on it, of course, but it's not
quite that late)
have been really given scraps for a fairly long time now WRT the state of new content going forward.
It always ends up with the usual problem. Frontier can't (or at least shouldn't attempt to) give us information they don't know themselves, and frustrating as it can be for players not to know what's coming next, getting information which turns out to be incorrect on either timescale or content or both ends up being even worse for everyone.
If Frontier
hadn't mentioned the Feature Overhaul in the first place, people might be marginally more anxious about "what comes after Update 18?" at this point, but they could have skipped a whole bunch of questions/complaints/frustration about not hearing anything about the Feature Overhaul, sold Update 15 as a positive "it's great to see so many participating in U14's Thargoid content, so we're going to add more of that" rather than a mixed "sorry, this Thargoid stuff turns out to be taking a while to finish off so we'll have to push the Feature Overhaul back a bit", released it at exactly the same time it'll eventually release, and quite possibly will have got better post-release feedback on whatever it turns out to be because people wouldn't have been imagining something completely different for years.
That's not an alternative which encourages them telling us about things with uncertain timescales which might never actually happen.