The question you might want to ask is why are these 2 major problems for this dev team? What kind of dev team are we dealing with here?

Compare to Blizzard. Blizzard is a company that forecasts changes, hypes it up, tests it thoroughly, and then releases it to massive success. It's a company that knows what it wants to do and experiments for a long time until it masters its ambition. The end product, World of Warcraft, may not compare to the gameplay ideal some of us share but for what it is it's incredible, and incredibly well received.

This dev team needs to find that inner spark, then enter into the same process as Blizzard. Then we will see the kind of detailed information you're talking about. The reason this dev team doesn't communicate is because they have no information TO communicate. They have no master plan. They make it up as they go along and their downfall is that their ideas don't have the time that Blizzard's ideas have to really take root.

You may have pointed out 2 things SE needs to do, I'd say they only have 1 thing they need to get: balls.