It doesnt matter what they doing behind the scenes because we're not behind the scenes! We only care about progression of content/updates to US so yes basing it off live servers is fine because thats what we're playing.

The reason for delaying info is most likely for 2 reasons: 1 so it makes us think they're working hard and we can say "they spent x amount of time on that" when they havent. and 2 because they probably keep changing stuff or broke and have to keep fixing stuff.