Here’s a video from 2017 about the definitive direction of development for Conan Exiles, sonta. In this case, vision and binding direction of game development are congruent, sonta:
EDIT:
And please excuse me for not addressing all of your points. I don’t want to deny that they have their justification. But I am observing a development that is following a very specific direction:
Part of this consists of continuing to finance Conan Exiles and, as a profit-making company, making money from it. To deny something like that would also be illusory. On the other hand, I find Funcom’s pricing policy to be much more humane than that of Blizzard Activision, UbiSoft or EA, for example.
I think that we can expect constant changes - and hopefully in a positive case. So I can very well imagine that this year or next year we will see culture-specific thralls being able to increasingly exclusively produce culture-specific items again.
Too often I see a self-sufficient PvP aspect emphasized here, which excludes things like settlement management or even trading. However, according to the very first statements from Conan Exiles’ developers, such an understanding of pure PvP was never present - kind of pure PvP, at least from the beginning, was never intended to be what it was at the beginning.
I still remember a number of players complaining that their pillar bases became useless after the god shield bubbles were removed and flying was implemented. Afterwards they simply claimed:
“NOBODY wanted that.” Wrong, you just bought a game that was supposed to have things like that from the start - only they weren’t realized until much later in development of Conan Exiles.