Yep, whoever is taking this stance doesn't understand the way things work obviously. Believe it or not, not every single person that works at Bethesda, or any development studio, is a programmer frantically working to wrangle bugs. They actually hire non-technical people whose only job is to focus on marketing, PR, social networking, web-content, and so on.
Some of those people certainly have the time and capability to communicate with the public, without, in any way, hurting the further development of a patch. They're obviously being told not to, probably because Bethesda doesn't want to be in any position of forced accountability. In other words, they can't be accused of not keeping to their word if they don't use any words to begin with.
Bethesda customer service is both terrible, and, sadly, not atypical. Believe it or not you're actually supposed to respond to the automatic robo-reply you get when you submit a ticket. No where in your email does it say that, I only knew about it because a forum admin told someone else here. If you reply enough times to their boilerplate responses, you will eventually get an actual person, but it takes a lot of effort, and they put these steps in the way hoping you'll just give up, to increase their throughput. I was told to "use the forums" about five or six times, even though my issue literally got 0 views, lol. One of their actual recommendations was that I start my game over from scratch due to what I'd assume they suspected was a save file corruption bug. No apologies or acknowledgement of anything - they said it like they asked me to do something routine, like reboot.
At the end of the chain I was informed that they're going to report my issue to the bug team, but they can't make any promises as to when (or if) it's going to be resolved.