again, without having a community liaison on their team as of yet, it takes away from development and organizational requirements everytime one of the Developers tries to make an update for us.
Quick updates, like a discord post, hold no 'official' obligations, they are just heads up, and as such, can be done really quickly sometimes, if a developer has a few minutes to spare, and that's great and helps keep us informed in broad strokes.
This being said, the Discord updates can't just be copied and pasted as NEWS or Kickstarter updates, because these carry a level of official obligation to them that requires that the be professionally formatted, edited, and scrutinized prior to release for public consumption. Where a discord post might be done in 5 mins, by 1 developer, a decent NEWS or Kickstarter update can take several hours to become suitable for release, and generally involves a minimum of 2 sets of eyes, if not more go over it to make sure they aren't making promises or predictions they have no intention of keeping. No matter how good a writer a single Developer might be, nothing official should EVER go out to the public without having been gone over bare minimum by a separate editor. (One cannot truly edit their own writing, because we have a tendency to self-correct in our head, so errors aren't actually seen). In addition to that Developer writing an initial official update, and at least 1 editor going over that update for professionalism, grammar, spelling, etc..., the Developers in charge need to come together and review such a release and agree on its relative accuracy at the time of posting. Different Devs have different things on their plates, different schedules when they might be free to read over and comment on such a post, so it is generally something that now takes a dedicated meeting, at least 1-3 revisions, and a final overview check before it can be published as official. That 5 minute possible 'keep us in the know' that we ask for in design terms is potentially costing several developers anywhere from 2 hrs ot 8 hrs each in actual time away from their own contributions to the game development and organizational situation of the project.
This is why a community liaison is generally hired (when it can be afforded into their budget, that is.) Such a person would go to each Developer on the Dev's schedules, and get regular progress reports, do a professional level write-up of a NEWS article/Kickstarter update, go to the Head Dev(s) for approval of the content, then submit it to editing for final posting. This is a full time job for the liaison and at least a part time commitment for an editor.
I'm all for getting updates, and it is good to keep the community on board with what's happening, however, I'm also for sacrificing some of that updating if it means the Developers can get more progress done on the game itself.
As to the concept of "stop worrying about adding more to the next alpha, and release a smaller release now while we wait," remember, when they go to release any kind of Alpha test, all Development stops for as long as it takes to migrate what they currently have onto the test servers for us to work on, the Developers closing any holes that remain because they were still 'works in progress' so that it is a playable test. Each time they stop to do that, in other words, they halt work on the overall progress of the game. I'm not one for wanting an alpha test to come out everytime a new T is crossed or I is dotted in the overall scheme of things. As they are only running quarterly (roughly) Alphas right now, it is important that each Alpha has enough new content to really justify launching the test series.