The one thing that they could have done to minimize the fallout if that was indeed how it eventually played out would have been to make a stronger statement RE "we are looking into how we need to handle this" up-front at the beginning, maybe raising the point that it wasn't just a matter of a unilateral handwave and POOF something would be settled one way or the other; they seem not to have realized that they were facing an instant-gratification internet generation of fans who would interpret the first response as the response without considering that more may have still been afoot. A bit more of "dude, we have sixty-five people we have to call up on the phone about this and then some of them need to talk to each other" would have gone farther towards fostering more of an impression that it was a delay and not an answer of silence...