I disagree. For one this phone is catering to a crowd of people who actually understand the facets of security within the digital domain. Secondly many people who are concerned about their privacy and security are rather extremely concerned about those things and are also pretty vocal.
If Purism were to be more vocal during the development of the product to include all of the roadblocks, it would do more harm than good. People would speculate without end about everything, and Purism would have to hire staff just to quell the fires this would create.
On top of this, development of this nature is fraught with challenges and roadblocks that are not easy to communicate effectively to the customer. Customers who think they know a lot often times reach the wrong conclusion and are quite vocal about it.
Lastly to use cheap kickstarter projects as a reference for the amount of communication to be expected is unrealistic. The difference in complexity amongst the two are most likely exponential. There is a reason Canonical wanted an insane amount of money to even consider trying to build their own phone, and their phone wasn’t trying to give us hardware based on FOSS principles.
All of this to say that I think the amount of communication we are getting is just right for this type of truly complex product. If they were more vocal they would be making a mistake.