I think the question isn’t if he can or can’t but if he should. I’ll quote the messages he posted on the Classic Era discord below for clarity.
Aggrend:
i’ll preface this by saying, this is a generalized statement about why sometimes announcements or info on future releases comes what you might think of as “late”
the problem with communicating super early is that in the development process, a lot of things change. communicating half baked ideas or things that are likely to change is pretty likely to set incorrect expectations for what is coming. Additionally, there’s risk when doing any kind of feature or game development. Things may not go according to plan, or may end up taking longer than even your best estimates. When that happens, it sets players and the devs up for dissapointment.
I think a good example of this I can give is the announcement I made around being able to move your characters from SoM to wrath. We wanted to let people know well ahead of time that was coming so they could plan, but it ended up taking us a while to develop the tech for (its actually really complex and unprecendented to allow you to move between “regions” which is effectively what Era/SoM and Wrath were; separate regions) and it didn’t come with wrath pre-patch. I think if I had that to do over again, I’d have wanted to be a bit more sure about when exactly that would have been ready before announcing it, or at least having been more clear that it might not be ready by wrath ship.