Read above. It is part of their corporate culture. When I was there I brought up the CCP Games community as an example. We the community can work away at them bit by bit.
It's exactly their "corporate culture" that i am critical of and that i think Paradox is excellent at. It's a good thing that you and some others are trying to get them to open up bit it's sad that you need to "chip away at a mountain" to get the devs to interact with the community. I think the main reason this game isn't as big as it could have been is their reluctance to be open towards the community (to listen to criticism and to tell us what they are doing) and its so incredibly frustrating that relic doesn't seem to be aware of this.