ReadyNAS Rn 104 Drive contigents

I agree.
There are reasons not to announce like to be able to cancel a feature that won't work properly, to spend more time testing. Depending on companies they also want to "surprise" people (Apple is known for its non-disclosure policy with big keynote announcement effect, the French ISP "free" does the same to preserve concurrential advantage and get more impact with the announcement). It's always delicate to say something you promised won't be there, while saying you added features is quite easy... More over I think Netgear is planning things according to other companies planning (like BTRFS or Debian guys or their manufacturers (for drivers)) so they have to wait for them, and if they are late on schedule then Netgear is too.
I would clearly appreciate more transparency but this is clearly a bad bet for commercial companies in many situations, organisations providing free and open source software can provide those informations as they do not take financial risks doing it though. But for companies having auctioneers, a bad announcement means money loss and since people tend to notice more what we say rather than what we don't say, chances are that with the same missing feature, if you say unfortunately we couldn't do this, you will lose more money than if you kept it silent because people will think about the potential value of that feature and/or think you are incompetent.