They don't want to call it 'finished' before everything promised in the 'pre order' campain is in.
And looking back, calling a finished version what they released as a Beta would have certainly caused more problems than right now as some did not even think it was worth of the title Beta.
He still benefited from part of the product as advertised even with the delay, and there was no 'get a refund' if you're not happy deal to begin with, I get why he's upset, yet i'm not sure it would automatically grant a refund.
Now for early access, it came later in the deal as an alternate option to opt-in during the Beta, and it became the main way of accessing the game after they consulted with the players :
Poll can be found here
Blog post here
An the FAQ was modified to suit these changes when they announced the official 'release' of the Beta.
it was a change to what they originally had planned, but there was no lack of communication about it before they committed to it, the right time to bail out would have been there, not half a year later.
There was nothing shoddy about it (nor about the supposedly shoddy things he speaks about in his post) but yes, when a game uses early acces it abides by Valve rules for early access, and one of them is
no refunds !
Chucklefish is certainly to blame for not fulfilling their original release date time (which frankly was obvious at the time the Beta launched), but the no refunds policy is to pin on Valve.
Now I don't know the drama about Destiny, but I assume you got a beta Key, and then your actual key at release, sadly Steam Early Access doesn't work that way.