You could almost read into their comments as them trying to get rid of siege, especially being that part of their decision on not doing a classic shard was to not need to support more than one ruleset. Probably a good business decision on their end to force as many siege players over to prodo shards as possible then shut it down.
So they're either devious or just flat out incompetent...i guess pick one.
After seeing the video and how they've handled things lately, i take back anything good I said about the devs, and how it looked like the dev team might be getting their act together for once. Just when you start to think..."well...on the bright side they couldn't make UO any worse now!" they always step in and surprise you....