This is one of those quotes that, were it in a video interview, would play very differently, I think. I read it with Luke's slightly sarcastic, bemused voice in my head and it's simply a playful way to say, we have nothing to announce at this time. That's it. You are projecting hostility onto a quote that is not there.
I'm going to agree in part with you I think putting his words down on text robbed them of the tone in which they were said (likely awkward, jokey, evasive) and instead laid bear the problem at the heart of Bungie. They have no idea how bad this looks outside the Bungie cave instead only playing shadow puppets in the intense glow of their superfans on bungie.net. Look at Deej's updates, I gave up reading these after a few weeks when it became clear that was going to be no substantial discussion or info sharing with the community. Instead it was a vehicle for fluff pieces on the community and anodyne 'Reduced Error <Random Mammal>' technical updates that were silent on the significant issues with the raid.
I'm going to go with the Queen's Bounties here as an example, not the HoW equivalent but the vanilla version that showed up once. It's clear this was designed to allow PvE players access to a legendary lvl 20 armor piece and a legendary weapon to smooth that lvl 20-26 grind zone. The first week it dropped severely underlevelled friends and I did the launch/reload/launch thing to get that second game mission that we could just about scrape. It was damned frustrating at times but we chose that grind and the rush on winning was great but Bungie grew afraid it would break their awful Asc Mats system and so killed it after that first week. No communication it fell down the memory hole and because Bungie had deemed it unworthy of comment it was fine to just keep ignoring months of fan requests and then have the gall to call it a new feature when it was retooled for HoW.
Deej and Luke Smith's problem is that they are poorly briefed on the right tone to strike when dealing with criticism and that is not 'Aw bro

why so down? Look it's all cool man, here look at this new thing you can pay for instead'. On Thursday we are going to get more of the same from Deej but it'll be 'Aw bro not cool why wouldn't you wait before dogging us

We have all these cool goodies like shaders, bikes and maybe a gun but yeah it's $40/40/£40 so we cool now bro?'
I hope for their sake they radically rejig their community and PR teams because this 'carry on regardless' attitude is driving folks away and causing unnecessary grief for people like Luke who should not be handling the hard questions (and seriously it's E3 a PRESS event be prepared for this).