Is there a plan to provide high-level design briefs for major feature releases to help bridge the gap between initial limitations [and the long-term vision]?

As mentioned several times in the show, we did. Now, not as detailed as we used to. This person might be referring to the olden days, where we would write up this entire thing — we did a design brief on Mixmaster, we did a design brief on an entire game loop about how to make drinks for NPC passengers and keep them happy. And the reality of development is that so many things have changed since then. Systems have changed. People have changed. We've all grown. And the likelihood that that document is anything remotely accurate is... you don't need me to make a comment on it. You should be able to tell. So we moved away from full-on design briefs like that, because all too often it just led to disappointment. Because again, we ended up changing it because we had to, because of some technical limitation, or changing it because somebody new joined the team and came up with a better idea. And it's like, well, we're not going to stick with the old idea if it's not as good; we want to do the new idea. But now we've changed: "You didn't do what you said you were going to do," even though it's something we believe is better. So we did move away from those old super detailed design briefs of yore. And maybe that's what they're referring to. But we have made an effort this last year to update things like the mining guide and the salvage guide and the crafting guide and the medical guide and the cargo guide, and make a lot of our intentions known, make a lot of our philosophies known, and give a glimpse at the future of where this feature is going, like we did with medical and like we did with crafting lately — and engineering. So there is that effort. It won't be as detailed as it was back in the old days.

We have those big new features that we want to explain to people as best we can, especially since we're going to be iterating on them, and we don't want to do in-game versions of those tutorials yet. We want to have those available for people.

And then of course we do shows like this, where we talk to the designers and we explore their intentions and what their struggles are.