Yeah, his track record there is quite poor. I've met with Yoshida personally every year since 2011 and the amount of honesty he shares is unmatched. Tabata, on the other hand, speaks to fans chained to a marketing director. What does that say about that.
Tabata and Ofuji also seem pretty honest and underpromising even. Ofuji often seems surprised about what Tabata says, too, showing that probably not everything is scripted 100%. If anything they often seem to say things that aren't that smart PR-wise (Cidney, female party members, spoiling the fight against Magitek soldiers in the demo, etc.). How does that look like PR-controlled talk?
Now why they didn't talk about the Stella thing earlier, nobody knows, but maybe they underestimated fans' connection to Versus' character
concepts before the demo survey feedback. If you argue that they willingly lied to ride on the Versus hype (which, honestly, I don't think has been that huge before the FFXV rebrand in the mainstream), wouldn't it have been strategically better to answer stuff like this long before rolling out the main marketing, anyway, so as to not generate negative word-of-mouth just a few weeks before gamescom?
Most mainstream followers who aren't on message boards (like many of my friends who will buy FFXV, too) weren't even aware that Stella and Luna were two different characters. They could have just kept Stella's name and never mention that they even rewrote her, because we never would have known otherwise. So they willingly decided to be honest and take the flak, when they could have avoided it. Seems stupid PR-wise. They even read Nojima's letter and emphasized that they thought long and hard about changes out of respect. Of course, they could be lying and acting. We don't know. I chose to believe them. You're free to do otherwise, of course.
I don't necessarily see a conspiracy here. Maybe they just didn't think the story changes were such a huge deal because they might have seen how badly written the story was before (Nojima + Nomura - what do you expect?) and for them it was only natural and not a thing that had to be clarified before the story blowout they planned for the last months leading to the release. Then they were surprised about the questions regarding Stella and decided to respond now.