Although we do know a few things now, there's much that only the interested parties now, and even then, they may not agree, and have different views. I do think that there are complex issues that we are not aware of. Some have been hinted in press releases and interviews, but
I honestly can't believe that at least 20 people working on a software project (as complex as it may be), supposedly full-time employees with *previous* knowledge of the system (in some cases dating to 3 or 4 years) and different game mechanics can be so little productive, unless there are things such as who owns the Intellectual property, really not motivated devs or similar. Or, as Kaetemi hinted, there's been a lot of development but it has not made it live, for whatever reason (bad management, hidden agendas, you name it...)
I have stated before. Look at the development effort and results (deliverables, lines of code, implemented modules, changes, etc.) in the time periods 2002-2004, 2004-2005, 2005-2007... true, it's been some number between 50 and 20 employees. Let's assume worst case: 20 employees, from the liquidator, remove community managers, mangement layers and anyone that is not productive from a dev point of view and assume that there are 3 devs and 2 3d artists. 5 mman month for 8 months, with *hands-on* experience. It is hard to believe that they cannot fine tune 1h weaps for good, add a few 3d models, etc. So there should be a reason to explain this.
Without knowing what happened exactly, it is hard to tell something about one given company. But I do think that concerning development, it's been a mess, with uncompleted features, parting in all directions (spires, ops, pvp, ring, kitin nest, missions) and yes, I do think that somehow we've been treated without honesty (did I say malice? nope, some clever guy said that Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence), not only by GF but by previous owners as well (Ranging from the "outposts are simply disabled in FBT, will be there for release" to the "here are the titles we are working on")... How can you honestly look us when you publish a document about a Kitin nest when you positively know that it will not go live before 1 year?)
I guess that in the real world it's free for all, and if stating something can cover your back and keep a few players around, ethics are secondary. The truth is that I don't see a lot of difference the way GF and Nevrax treated the end customers, except in communication, but that's also debatable, for some may prefer no communication that false promises and about great plans of world domination, patch processes, etc.