This is probably true. Everything they do in Elite has a priority and the high priority tasks get done first. It's a never ending list and high priority tasks always get put on the list above ones that have been there for ages.
And indeed, there are a plethora of things they could do but all are subject to that same priority. I dare say that if you could see their list you would be quite certain that they are thinking way out of the box that you consider to be out of the box.
But priority is the trump card.
Yeah, priority is probably high up, but I think there's more to it.
Season 3.0 Beyond was expressed as making trading, mining, and exploration priority. Then we have more combat in the first update than we have updates to the other parts. Yes, C&P got upgrade which has to do with combat, and engineering which mostly used for min-maxing for combat (some for exploration, but not much for trading or mining), and we got guardian weapons, and some updates to trading and exploration. But it's just breadcrumbs. Combat gets priority 3 times over even when the priority is supposed to be somewhere else. So if the promise is to prioritize the other aspects, yet the non-priority aspects get the top priority, then there's something off.
I think this focus has more to do with how easy it is to make another combat ship, new weapon, another ruin site with puzzles to get blueprints to weapons, and so on. It's easier to imagine new combat scenarios than there is to imagine tech for the other careers. And making a compass for planetary landing isn't hard. Now ED Discovery does it for you. A 3rd party tool can do it, only weeks after the new coordinate info in the log files were introduced. Easy to do, but it's not a priority because FDev can't think of a "use for it". Yet, it's implemented in EDDiscovery because... there is obviously a use for it. I've had a need for it about 20-30 times in the past year as an explorer in an expedition, so during a year of priority of these things, "we [Fdev] don't see a use for it" shouldn't be the excuse since we, the explorers and many other, do see a use of it.