@edgecrusherO0 They won't be transparent because it would expose a lot of things they don't want made public. The skeleton crew theory is true, there are only a few devs left, who are doing their best, but sorely undermanned. The test and cert process takes almost a week. So even with small changes you are looking at no less than 3 to 5 days to hotfix.
Season 1 should've been the release of the game and the entire period before that shouldve been brought back to beta with free to play. That would've been more widely accepted than what they tried to do in that period.
At this point, the specialists are here to stay, but if they add a server browser, squad management, and add more portal content to AOW, the player count will go up and stay there.