Thing is we did alot of the forum was upset with the lay offs but unlike this issue it also affected the future content so the people expressing concern for the lost employees were not as apparent over the concern of people abut losing content. Not saying there isnt a level of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance within the community and the industry as a whole there definitely is but comparing the issues isnt exactly equal. I do think the outrage is disproportionate to what is actually happening.
Of course it's apples and oranges, but the word "disproportionate" is key here. Only a handful of people actually called Frontier out for the lay offs and used words like "bad business practice". From most people there wasn't more than a "oh, sorry to see xy go, I wish them all the best."
There weren't pages of outrage that all these people were laid off (and treated awful in the process, Tims action on the life stream and a few twitter posts by the former employees are enough to see that).
But beware if there is a limited time frame to get pixel animals, to encourage people to pre-order...
And I don't buy the "console players could find out about the game years from now", in all honesty. No one in thsi world can convince me that real zoo game enthusiast slept on the PC version for 4 years and did NOT follow Frontier closely to eventually find out about a console release.
And I have zero doubts that everyone who isn't that invested in zoo games (so that they indeed sleep on the game for 4 years) are NOT in desperate need of a Thomzon Gazelle, a pygym hippo or a komodo dragon.
And as
@ElectricMonk mentioned: Frontier repeatedly said "exclusive animals for pre-order", so the question if or if not the animals will be available at a later date shouldn't even exist. It's not Frontiers fault people needed to have it spelled out what "exclusive" means.
I still think they will release those animals seperately in a year or two, it's just not a promise.
As a side note: Yes, the soundtrack missing the ingame music is annoying and lackluster.