Yes, it's a joke the forums are useless when you remember it's one of the very first thing Yoshda decided when he took the direction.
(or maybe it was already planned and he made it sound like it was his decision)

During 1.x, there was this "everything's possible" ambiance, so they could just answer to anything and every little question (and of course a lot of these small things "announced" got lost with time and never made it to the game). With 2.0, the game started to follow a very rigid template, thus the communication around it got rigid too (fanfest, live-letter, nothing more)

Another "problem" is the translation in 4 languages, they've been ostensibly limiting budget on translation in the game (less guildleves because it was too much text, and some quests don't have summary since stormblood)