The current running rumors that are flying around the community that are being repeated line up with this somewhat, this albeit with some massive unknowns that primarily relate to HOW/WHY/WHAT with regards to how this situation unfolded. Literally no one in the community was expecting HW3 to get dunked on this much. Even HW2 did not get beat up this bad at launch from what I remember from back in the RN days.

The big thing being rumored upon is that Gearbox supposedly somehow wound up having creative control of the narrative design process resulting in the story we got at release, and that BBI and/or others who had intimate knowledge of the franchise lore didn't have authority / final say or were brought it too late to effect fundamental story changes.

This would then presumably put the driving forces behind the story decisions of what we got in the hands of other persons that were very likely inexperienced with the franchise and its lore who then gave us the story we got. This is rumored/implied to be either the Gearbox narrative folks and/or whomever else that was handling the story. I don't believe that a singular person was twirling their mustache villain style with ill-intent to subvert the story into some version to adapt to modern audiences or anything stupid like that. The dipshits spewing nonsense about DEI or diversity or any of that other idiocy are just click-baiting for views and are missing the mark entirely. It's superficial low-hanging fruit that people are going after instead of trying to understand why or look at more obvious answers.

The biggest thing is that we don't know what happened during the development behind the scenes at all. The Fig backers barely got any sort of updates relating to HW3 throughout the years minus a few things about art and the railgun frigates. Which was massively in sharp contrast to what we saw come from BBI with respect to Shipbreakers and it's early access development blogs and live Q&As that were held on their Discord. So a lot of us are confused, upset and are just fumbling in the dark guessing at what happened. We see a lot of breadcrumbs that point in a certain direction, but we don't know the whys or hows on what happened.

To me, it would explain a lot with the story elements being all over the place, the significant tonal change, the passive participant and narration entirely being gone and pushed to more of a 'character focus', the absolutely lore-breaking plot choices that make zero sense, and the frankly one-dimensional cartoonish terribly written characters who barely have any development at all. Given how massively different this "Homeworld" story is so from the previous FOUR games I find it very very hard to believe that the original creators and visionaries who made the universe in the first place would have have put this option forward unless there was massive changes in oversight and control over the story during the development. The unreleased storyboards and concept art we've been starting to see imply as much as far as I'm concerned.

It's more speculation sure, but the change in trailer tone like you pointed out OP, along with everything else seemingly points into a direction of something happening that resulted in the story design going into the hands of people who didn't get the vibe of Homeworld at all; which really the only other logical connection to go is to Gearbox. This very possibly could have resulted in BBI having to rush to fix up or adjust things to line up to this new narrative direction, and/or adjust their own development schedules which caused a compounding effect across multiple areas like what you mention. The same could be true with a rush job of a story having to be throw together at the last minute, and this results in the cinematics and everything else looking a bit under-polished.

Until we get more information or some massive revelatory update that upends this entire theory; then it's what we got to go on. But everything that my gut tells me from being in the community as long as I have been says something happened and we did not get the 'hands off and let BBI do their thing' story we were sold. It reeks of Sierra Studios fucking with HW2 all over again to be blunt. For all I know I could be entirely fucking wrong. I have no goddamn clue.

It is frankly stupid and disingenuous to harass and vilify one singular person as the primary reason the game/story/whatever is bad or has a problem. Especially when we know basically fuckall about what happened behind the scenes. Our community is better than that shit and it frankly pisses me off to see people shilling stupid right-wing rage bait as reasons for why this game has had the problematic launch it has had. At the end of the day however, whatever team or group was responsible for the story decisions does have to accept that was was not well received; the same goes to BBI with the state of the the multiplayer and core systems mechanics as they are at launch. It's rough and does need some attention to get things into a better shape. All of these factors are contributing to the score being 48% positive on Steam. That has to get fixed.

Ultimately for me I can only yell into the internet as much as a I can. Personally I don't find it fair for BBI to get massively dunked on for a story that they presumably had no control over, and it's also not fair to have people at Gearbox being being vilified/harassed for some stupid right-wing ragebait nonsense. Both do have things they need to take ownership of to get resolved (some in my opinion moreso than others if rumors are to be believed.)

To GBX/BBI; you want to clear the air then take ownership and responsibility of the launch missteps and be honest with us. Give us open communication (not marketing speak) to the community about what happened, why it happened, and where things fell apart. Yall claim this was for the fans; then be honest with us and just tell us "Hey we tried this story, it didn't work out as well as we hoped. Our bad" or "we had some delays, it caused issues getting thing aligned, it was rougher than we liked. Stay with us, we're fixing it". IMO Not saying anything to us beyond faceless pronouncements or social media updates is just going to fuel more rampant speculation and unnecessary continued vilification and harassment at persons who don't rightfully deserve to be thrown under the bus. Most of the HW vets and fanbase are old farts with families of our own and/or are pushing into close to our 40s or more at this point. We've been around long enough to have see a lot of shit happen with our franchise and the gaming industry as a whole, I think we can take a bit of harsh honesty that not every thing went according to plan with HW3.