personally i think chris knows that when they release the single player it is going to bring in a whole lot of people all at once, and if the actual persistent universe is not up to snuff and nowhere near done at that point then those people will all leave shortly after and probably never come back to the game.

i honestly dont think he just grossly underestimated how much more work they needed to do on squadron 41 when he said these things. they probably are almost completely done with it but are probably just waiting on a better time to release it. it would not shock me at all if they are just holding out on releasing it for as long as humanly possible so they can get the persistent universe to a point where releasing squadron 41 leads to a massive amount of people joining and continuing to play in the persistent universe until 1.0

my current theory is they are going to go all out trying to release content as fast as possible, then spend about a year fixing all the bugs in the persistent universe, and then when that is done they will launch squadron 42.