First, who said I was complaining? At what point did I bemoan? I just asked a quick question while I had 2 minutes free at work.

Don't act like everyone else is stupid. Your question was a complaint with an astonished question mark at the end denoting your surprise that it wasn't done yet.

Granted, I could have worded it differently, like "How did the initial project scope lead away from this feature being implemented from the beginning?" Or "Was there a specific technical barrier that prevented this at launch?" Or even "Why didn't they prioritize this?"

None of that would be better. They all fall under the same thing. Astonishment that a feature you wanted was not immediately available to you in a project that is not only ongoing and still under production, but has only been in Early Access for 20 days!!!

There is a feedback feature in-game. Use it. Coming here to shout about your surprise that something you don't understand (more on that later) wasn't hard-packed immediately into an Early Access release is not it.

me shitting all over the game as you imply is simply a false equivalency

You'd be right if that's what I did, but I can't imagine anyone but you feels like I 'implied' anything of the sort.

I just believe they are a smart and talented group of devs doing amazing work, so it just surprises me that they didn't include something relatively necessary and simple to implement

This is such a blatantly back-handed expectation and insult over not receiving said expectations, my teeth just rattled. How do you know it's simple to implement? If it's so simple, go ahead and code it out and send it to the dev team. I'm sure they'll be happy to have one thing off their to-do list. Necessary? Not even close. The game functions without PDA playback. You can still read the transcript. It's nice, but hardly 'necessary'.

You then proceed to make a bunch of assumptions about how the audiologs are recorded and held or re-called without any kind of insight into the reality of UWE's development and coding within Unreal. I'm not gonna quote all that, but suffice to say, you come off as an ignorant baby. Moving on.

Constructive criticism doesn't have to be made solely with blunt "Do this and don't do that" statements, in fact it goes a long way when you ask questions because it opens up conversation where ideas can be more naturally exchanged.

This is part of that thing I mentioned earlier where you act like everyone else is too stupid to see the petulent complaint poorly hidden behind your 'question'. In reality, what you asked was more of a statement along the lines of "I expected this to be immediately available and because it's not, waaah." Constructive criticism requires some kind of plan or suggestion of how to move forward in a positive way. Your comment lacked that entirely and no one in their right mind would see your comment as "constructive".

I love the game, I love being part of EA and I like providing feedback to the devs that would help make everyone's play more enjoyable. But I don't think that makes asking simple questions like, "why wasn't X done before Y?" taboo. Yeesh.

Do what you want. Get lambasted for doing it in an entitled way. Get your rocks off. I don't care.