What Zygmund talks about is when they made a game design decision for T9A to be its own thing, rather than a fixed Warhammer 8th edition in all but name. The stated reason for it? Warhammer Total War. The Old World no longer was an abandoned franchise by GW, and the possibility of legal action being taken by GW against T9A became a far more likely prospect than it had previously been. I wasn't yet playing T9A at the time, so Zygmund knows better than me what happened. Far as I can tell though, the decision was made at the top without asking the wider community, on the basis of internal discussions with the T9A legal team, discussions that were kept secret to retain attorney-client privilege. Or so they said. I can see how a shitstorm could have erupted out of all that.
As far as being or not being Warhammer, it de facto largely is so at the moment, but being its own thing is indeed in the long-term pipeline. Mainly through the release of the full, completely reworked army books. So far, only Warriors of the Dark Gods (aka Chaos Mortals) have gotten theirs. I'd say it largely manages to do so, though the similarity will always be there because of the design goal to enable people to keep playing with their existing model collections.
I've used to say that T9A is community-driven in the same way the Soviet Union was: There is a vanguard party that ultimately answers to the community, but does its own thing day-to-day as it sees fit and considers itself to know best. A vanguard party that pretty much everyone can get into and involved with, but one in which you ultimately need the favour of those already on the top to really rise high.
I would say, though, that they are genuinely listening to feedback and considering it, even going to greater lengths than most to collect it. The issue is just the broad scope and objective of the entire project. To create a game that will be the new common standard in rank and file fantasy wargaming, like Warhammer once was. A universal fantasy rank and file wargame, or as close as one can be to such a thing. Which means having to please the broadest possible player population with the most diverse wants and preferences, which forces them to balance all kinds of conflicting objectives and priorities. Most of the time it's not a conflict between the wants of the wider community and the vision of a clique of insiders, but rather, between different factions within the community. That's before even considering differences in opinion among the insiders. I swear, for every prominent team member who has quit because of disagreement over the direction the project is going, there's another who has quit for exactly the opposite reason. The end result is a jack-of-all-trades game that probably has a good shot at becoming said universal fantasy rank and file wargame, but one that might not appeal to those with strong, precise and extreme preferences regarding game design philosophy.
As far as it comes to interaction between the team and the wider community, I think the recent mid-February hotfix to the 2.0 beta originally released in December shows both the best and the worst of that, of what the process can be at its best and what it can turn into at its worst.
For Empire, the hotfix was a case of everything going right. Empire ACS (Army Community Survey, the team members who process army subforum feedback into digestible pieces for the rules team) did a well-organized effort to collect feedback, arrange discussions and conduct polls, and presented their findings to the rules team, along with ready suggestions. The rules team delivered. All kinds of unused, overcosted things got points discounts, and the most controversial and ill-advised change (removal of great weapon knights) was undone. Everyone acted reasonably and in good faith, and gave the other entities involved in the process the benefit of the doubt. The result was well received and most people on all sides of the process were satisfied.
For Highborn Elves, the hotfix was a hot mess. In the original 2.0, they got some quite overpowered things, things that were received with rejoicing in the army community due to opening up new playstyles that weren't competitive before. Came hotfix time, the HbE ACS started off acting essentially as lawyers on behalf of their community, for why their new overpowered toys should be nerfed as little as possible, wasting both time and opportunity to advance proposals on nerfs that would have made them not OP but still retained their usefulness at enabling new playstyles. When they eventually came around to do just that, it was too late, they had wasted time that had been scarce to begin with. Miscommunications happened between the different involved teams and people who worked without much coordination, an ever-present potential problem when the project runs on lots of irregular part-time volunteer work and needs to be highly parallellized to make effective use of all that manpower. The resulting HbE hotfix wiped out much of the gains made by the 2.0 HbE betabook, was a mess not really liked by any of the involved parties, and caused a shitstorm on the HbE forum, made worse by the resignation in protest by one of their ACS guys.
Make of all that what you will. Me, I'm firmly in the T9A camp. Its imperfections aside, what it has achieved is truly remarkable. In view of what it has achieved, its issues are to me really first world problems of fantasy wargaming. We abided far worse for far longer from GW.
