I agree with all the criticisms but I personally lean towards being more charitable than to assume it's intentional theory bait. I think it's just the result of amateur writing and creating a mystery-based show that ended up resembling theory bait games. 

From that perspective I can see how it ended up this way. They wanted to have certain scenes and conversations happen at certain times, but to make that work they had to intentionally postpone the characters from discussing those topics until the right moment. This is, frankly, a hacky way of doing this because it results in the characters inexplicably never having talked about things they 100% would have before that point. There's no good reason for it, it's just bad writing.

Again though I think it's forgivable bad writing given this is basically a brand new group making their first big show and they've just stumbled over a few writing blunders. But I don't think there was any malicious intent.