As much as I like to fuck around, it most certainly is. I have two friends in game development, one in a big company overseas and one in a small Danish outfit, and they've both said to me on different occassions that the most effective marketing strategy, which I find really weird, is make a big announcement years in advance, show very little until right before the release and then give the marketing another hard pounding. I can understand the latter part of course, it's the first bit about announcing so early only to then respond with relative silence for a long time that I don't get. But both of these guys are very good at what they do and make their respective companies a lot of money, so I trust their judgments - and besides, they both say it's the industry standard today for a reason: basically, the point is to get two launches (launches are responsible for the vast majority of sales). With this method, you get an EA launch where you sell a bunch of games and a real launch, which is obviously way more massive in terms of sales (and then maybe EE launches etc., but these have way lower value). So all the patches and the marketing in between the EA and the "real" release isn't to actually market the game, it's just something you have to do at that point if you wanted the EA launch (because EA customers expect it).
So basically my point is even if I like beating this dead horse of a joke, there's probably nothing we can divine either way about the dev status from the low effort releases. They are likely intentional regardless of whether the dev process is going poorly or well internally in terms of content production.
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