Hehe, well, that's what I meant when I said that you might have been affected by "selective hearing/reading". My personal impression was different and my expectations were different, too. I never in my right mind expected RoA/TDE to return to the PC with a turn-based combat system. That just wasn't and still isn't ever going to happen again.
Also, I thought that the folks from Radon Labs and dtp/Anaconda were very open and actually pretty straight-forward in their communication about the game's features. Now I know that someone like you who isn't into "diplomatic" talk at all probably would have preferred a straight "Look, we're going to fuck you old schoolers in the ass. Deep and hard. And if you don't like it we'll pay for your trip to our office and we'll show you that we mean it, too" (any similarity of the previous sentence to what might have happened on another RPG forum recently with or without your involvement is purely coincidental, of course
).
Well, anyway, most people prefer a more subtle approach and I do think that Radon/dtp actually managed to find a good balance between being direct and straight-forward in setting expectations straight and at the same time maintaining a friendly, polite and pleasant tone that I would not even call "marketing speak". The PCG article included some marketing speak but on the forums they just did tell it like it is.
The forums were naturally at first populated by the hardcore DSA (TDE) fans so there were a lot of plain unrealistic feature requests and ideas put out there in the beginning. All that Radon/dtp did was let those people (the "dreamers") know that they should please be so kind as to have realistic expectations. I mean why should they piss those peeps off in addition to shattering their dreams? That would be kind of mean
.
Bottom line: I always felt that they were very direct, open and honest in their communication but that's just my own perception and impression, of course.