Its how frontier do things.
Frontier are very secretive for marketing and relative to the rest of the industry seem to completely disregard and ignore their player base (as much as their community managers puff about grandiosely claiming the opposite).
This is works out pretty good however. What's left is they're kind of blizzardish in that they have their own internal closed vision and build what THEY want. I think its better this way than keeping everyone happy mode. Frontier can only be counted on taking playerbase opinion is when they come out and ask for a vote or feedback. The one time they asked for a vote in elite was a catastrophic failure, so yeah frontier are better as they are.
I get the impression that you didn't buy into the PC Alpha? If you did then did you ever even visit the PC forums during Alpha 1, 2 and 3? Seems that you didn't if you think that Frontier disregard and ignore their player base, as a great deal of what made the base game release (and a lot of the tweaks and improvements to a number of areas of that game) were all either suggested, influenced or in some cases demanded by the player base during those alpha tests
FD want to make the game that they want to make. Within that structure they will try to please as many as possible but they won't stray from their original vision nor will they severely alter their direction of the game to appease a section of people. Ideally they should add and include things on top of what they have to expand out into the rough directions people want to go. But game dev just isn't that black and white a lot of the time, and it's not really fair to judge it in such a way
Back to the topic at hand, I think transparency in certain areas would be a real benefit to Frontier at the moment. There seems to be a lot of noise coming from different areas that are either worried, annoyed or holding off on the game because of the lack of info. As others have said, there isn't anything wrong with saying "there is a sandbox based mode in the game." or saying "it won't be at launch but we're looking into it soon after". I also don't think there's anything wrong with them loosely saying what they mean by sandbox if it's in
They can also say things like "we're adding a lot of extra decorations", "we're adding a few extra terraforming tools" - or of course they could say "at launch, the level of decoration and terraforming you saw in the demo is what is available. We'll look to expand this in future updates"
They don't have to give specifics and so they can keep within the boundaries of the NDA as well as not spoiling any game plots. I do think however they will hold off on a lot of info drops because of PAX East and E3 (E3 they are at, PAX I don't know) but it would make more sense to drop trailers, hints, extra content and stuff like that at an event or just after, as opposed to random
Also as a side note, yeah Universal are licensing - the use of assets, music, models etc. Universal (as far as we know unless the devs confirm otherwise) have no control or say on gameplay mechanics, modes etc. They have a bit of say over content inclusion - being a 16 rated game doesn't mean you can have all the gore if Universal don't want that kind of direct gore, same way that you saw Hoskins blood at the end of JW but you never saw it pulse out of his hand when he was being bitten - but Universal aren't there saying "as the licenser of this game we won't allow you to include a sandbox mode, nor can you include decorations for the park, nor can you make our goats run like the cowards they should be"
