I mean the end of beta an entering full release is pretty noteworthy. Especially because there is a lot of content they have been working on over the years which is being held back for the end (most notably the story). After that Coffee Stain will either move towards making something new or creating some kind of expansion for the game.
Hate when that happens!
I might be wrong about this, but if I remember right, the PR team for NMS and the dev team had pretty much zero communication. Sony kept hyping the game up, very much making promises that the devs were trying to keep. However during development it became increasingly that they either need to push back on the release date or drop some features, neither of which Sony was ready to do. At that point it was already too late: the hype was built.
So instead of trying to do damage control Sony just pushed Murray in the focus, probably hoping he and his company would take the fall. Honestly it feels hard to blame him for what happened. He, at the time, was just an incredibly ambitious indie dev with no idea on how to manage expectations.
I feel like with Sony as your publisher, you don’t need enemies.
Exchange features aren’t in yet. They plan to release it in a 128.x version as it wasn’t ready for today due to technical reasons.