That video came out in December of 2014. Features got cut. Happens in games all the time.
I don't understand why people are still so mystified by this. It's a much more plausible explanation than "Sean Murray is a horrible man who lied to trick people into buying his game!" too.
I partially agree with you, because that indeed happens all the time, and people are taking that interview very literally while it was meant as a more lighthearted and jokey "100 questions" type of thing.
However, Hello Games and Sean in particular shot himself in the foot (in terms of public opinion, not sales, obviously) by refusing to talk about a lot of fundamental aspects of the game. This in turn created a massive hype machine and speculation threads, increasing every little detail he said to legendary heights.
Meaning, and I think this is a very possible scenario, when Sean was asked about customizing your character and answering with "sort of", he was merely thinking that you can have a custom upgraded exosuit and multi-tool, so it's "sort of" a character customization. This wasn't a deliberate lie meant to hype up some major gameplay aspect like character customization (in the sense that it hints it's there at all), it was a dumb quick response to a perfectly reasonable question.
To be clear though, if you keep acting like that, not communicating on things you're not sure about while outright saying there are things that you think will work but instead haven't been finished yet (and add to that the marketing material that's shown unfinished or non-existent things) leads to straight up misinformation, or lies if you will. That doesn't necessarily mean they intended to lie and deceive people from the start, but at some point it spiraled into exactly that, willingly or not, it doesn't matter really. If you end up selling a 60$ early access game with a bunch of core stuff not working as advertised (while the advertised details were few and taken very literally by your own fault), then you should expect a large backlash. Which is what they chose in the end, maybe hoping that the reactions wouldn't be that bad (long dev cycles can do that to you, especially if you don't have people that bring you to the ground and your head out of your ass), which obviously wasn't the case.
It feels like they chose to keep their studio afloat financially so they could keep working, instead of making a potentially devastating choice of coming out and revealing they're nowhere near as ready for release, delaying the game further, maybe changing contract terms with Sony etc. But I don't know, even then, it could've been prevented much, much earlier, before ever getting that far. It looks like a clear example of mismanagement and biting more than they could chew, relying on blind faith that they could still deliver and digging the ditch ever deeper.
So my main point is, HG's choice of trickled info dumps and mismanagement caused every single of their words dissected and scrutinized under a microscope (firstly increasing the hype), and then when the game came out in an unfinished state, people continued the same (or greater) level of information scrutiny to now prove just how every single word HG uttered was an outright lie. It was an overreaction in both cases.
But the bottom line is that HG did this to themselves, and as a company selling a product with misinformation, they should very well explain themselves instead of always saying "we worked hard and it was tough, we hear you and we'll continue working on it". It's easily seen as marketing bullshit speak expected from a big publisher instead of this small brave indie studio that many of us seemed to grow fond of.
On a personal level, I can understand why they're behaving the way they are right now. If I fucked up so royally, I'd probably like to crawl under a rock and just let the work speak in my place, but it's unfair to your customers and fans, and downright baffling from a marketing perspective. Well, maybe not that strange because it's a viable strategy all in all, but man, not cool.
I'm glad they're still working on the game, and hopefully one day it'll grow into something really special. If anything though, they've at least made a really good practical example of how-not-to-do things in this business, and it's one for the history books.
I will definitely buy it again digitally then.
time to start over again