The messaging was definitely deliberately obtuse, I agree. And you're right on the player expectation.
OK, next question: (and I'm not accusing you of this)
How does calling out Sean as a liar and essentially accusing the developer of fraud, when it is possible that there are still unknowns at play, affect the outcome in favor of the player? I can understand that people are angry and they definitely want their multiplayer, and I believe with enough coercion that the developer could accommodate those players. But why so much venom and toxicity over it? Especially when they actually made efforts to try and manage expectations beforehand, despite how ineffective those efforts were?
This is and has always been my main complaint here. I can understand wanting that feature in the game if it was cut, I can understand wanting it more accessible. I am mainly questioning the method of which people are using to achieve their goals here. This is what set me off to even post, that people are just straight up throwing accusations around without knowing all the facts and getting huffy because they're not getting a swift response.
I can sort of understand it as conditioning from other AAA companies that just let shit linger and don't fix their game and leave it to rot, but I'm hoping for a better answer because yes, poor indie dev. They're not some huge behemoth like EA or Ubisoft, where communication just gets lost in the shuffle. It's a small group of people.