If I had the info for you, I'd share it. That said, I hope you realise you're reading a lot of specifics in the phrase "we had some deadlines": it's a big team for a large game split across two studios in two offices aiming at ~3 new pieces of DLC next year + a free patch (per the floorplan dev diary) + aiming for a free patch
this year. The 3-4 of us most active on the forums having deadlines at the same time doesn't mean we're all working on the upcoming patch, or even that we're all working on the same thing. There'll be a DD up when we've got something to say.
I make it to be ~2.5 months since Friends & Foes, not six. :shrugs: I don't know what you're asking for here, honestly: either we can mention things early to let y'all know what we're up to, but in that case don't expect lots of details coming quickly, or we can mention things closer to release with a steady drip-feed of DDs, but then don't expect to know about vague WIP plans far in advance, or we can put out filler DDs that might be interesting to some but not all, but then not all the posts'll pertain to future DLCs.
The current approach is to put out fewer dev diaries that generally have more to say, partially because folks got pretty vitriolic about most DDs that didn't laser-focus on a DLC, and to try to be more engaged in the forums, Discords, and Reddit in the meanwhilst. We're not radio silent, we're just not talking about upcoming DLC at the moment.
That's an interesting question! In my experience, I think it's usually when we've got something that's vaguely functional and has at least a placeholder version of actual UX available. It's sorta difficult to show things off otherwise - there's always paper prototypes, sometimes script prototypes, and the
initial placeholder UX (i.e., the stuff Code makes in ~10m so there's enough for Design to work on), but those all tend to run into issues in DDs. It's easy to misunderstand a paper prototype (typically due to a lack of detail implying a lack of thought - this is something you see when anyone is given an early system with less than full context), script prototypes don't tend to show off much at all unless you know what you're looking at, and initial placeholder UX looks so god-awful that it can really sour people on a feature if that's all they've got.
If I'm honest, I also can't say I know many devs, especially outside of crowdfunded or early access titles, who open up the design process
that early or that communally. To take one example: I don't think Royal Court, for all the problems it had, would have much benefited much from being opened up early on. There would've been a lot of helpful feedback, for sure, but there also would've been an inordinate amount of lobbying to scrap the 3D scene and past a certain (very early) point that just wasn't going to happen, which is just asking for drama. More to the point, though, a lot of the issues it had didn't stem from a lack of good input/feedbacking/iterative processes, they came from a combination of the same post-release turnover many large titles go through, us onboarding another studio remotely on our project, and the general chaos of a global pandemic. Opening development at an earlier stage wouldn't necessarily have helped it much, but would've given more time for people to get worked up about particular bits. So whilst I see what you're saying, I don't think that's quite the best way to go about fixing it.
My personal preference would, instead, be to do more work with things like open betas, or openly scheduling popularly voted bugs & suggestions from their relevant sub-forums to be prioritised in the yearly free patch. ^^' And of course, we're still trying to be more active in the forums and get more people from the team active too. That one's a very much on-going.