I don’t remember them ever saying that the original VT2 talents system was a placeholder, and I don’t think the code really reflected that either. Neither did the announcement, I don’t think.
Yes, they pivoted from the archetype/classes structure, but what we got in the talent trees is loads better than the stale old formula.
As for crafting, it was meant to be in at launch and had big ol “coming soon” tags on everything but consecrate (iirc). They didn’t finish it in time. And they changed how blessing acquisition was going to work at the last minute. Major fumble. But they never doubled down on RNG, they systematically eased it before the rework: made traits deterministic, increased material drop rates, added Brunts instead of just the hourly shop we originally had, changed how the locks worked, etc.
The itemization update was a huge overhaul. They started talking about it in March of this year, put out a bunch of Q&As and seemingly changed systems due to feedback, and the overhaul was only just released. That’s a plenty long time to work on a feature, but I bet they were working on it before then.