You can defend them as much as you want. It doesn't change the fact that they could have said something after the Female Viera announcement, like it the missing genders would come in time, they wanted to give players more diversity and as such more options in regards to race differences, they wanted to perfect the races missing genders due to their body proportions being extremely different to what we currently had in game, ect...
Instead the hid the truth, remained silent while a great deal of the player base made obvious their expectations, and and cited their own established lore to validate their stance, after they have already thrown out that same lore for other races.
Respect is supposed to be earned, Yoshi P has gone a long way to get that from the community, that's why this stings so much. I expected better from him. He let his bias choose the outcome here and hid it until the final fan fest in Tokyo with no explanation in the face of fan excitement. As i see it he hid the truth until he knew player wouldn't call him out on it while on stage. Blizzard taught many developers something very valuable. Make sure your audience can't/ wont call you out to your face.
