It reeks of implementation deadlines, really. They talked for too long about being mindful of adjustments for it to be thrown away and a flag changed like this.
My personal, no-insight guess is that they didn't have the means to give what they promised at 2.38, but they'd already been harangued into giving something. Remember, they had no intentions of letting individuals buy their own stuff; Both personal housing AND personal rooms were added in after players whined for them. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a revised version of player housing down the line after 2.4 (which is where the bulk of their current dev time is spent, let's be honest) and they just use whatever they were working on for the past couple of months there.
Look at it from the other side: Do you give a half-assed version and patch in the "real" bits later? Or do you just straight-up give nothing and expect people to be content with that?
My personal, no-insight guess is that they didn't have the means to give what they promised at 2.38, but they'd already been harangued into giving something. Remember, they had no intentions of letting individuals buy their own stuff; Both personal housing AND personal rooms were added in after players whined for them. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a revised version of player housing down the line after 2.4 (which is where the bulk of their current dev time is spent, let's be honest) and they just use whatever they were working on for the past couple of months there.
Look at it from the other side: Do you give a half-assed version and patch in the "real" bits later? Or do you just straight-up give nothing and expect people to be content with that?