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The Matrix reference was more about the last part, where you hypothetically stated that CoH3 development is slow because Relic is directing everything at the expansion and everything is fine as is.
We both don't believe it.
After initial critique and failure, CoH2 became a decent success and successor to CoH1. UKF for CoH2 got released a good 2 years after the main game's launch. I don't remember exactly when the community took over balancing and most of the patch work, but I think it was soon-ish after.
Good devs often support their game for 2-3 more years. But afterwards, they really need to move on to another product and focus on that instead, that's just the way it is. Given the current pace of development and seeing how CoH3 developed after more than half a year by now and what their plans until December are, I don't have big hopes of CoH3 becoming the go-to company of heroes game like CoH2 finally became with >80% of the player base.
Unless the expansion is a huge success (which it won't be, it will be single player only) that draws back an unexpected amount of players, leading to SEGA and Relic rethinking the strategy and diverting more resources to CoH3 again, nothing much will change.
Relic doesn't even need to drop the game. Extend the current pace of development for 2 more years: Where do we end up? CoH3 will be a decent game, some strengths, some weaknesses. But I doubt it will be the game that sucks me in for another 1000+ hours as CoH2 did. CoH2 was my main game for more than 5 years, every time friends and I met up online we'd ALWAYS play CoH2.
CoH3 will never be. At least I don't have any faith in it. The failed planning during development and subsequently financially disappointing release for SEGA did too much damage.