Seeing as Josh's role is Public Relations / Investor Relations and not head of slicing and packaging I find it hard to believe that he was left out of the loop on that one. Seems in his role at BFL he should be made aware of all those pesky little details....
According to Josh, he'll be personally over-seeing the slicing and packaging which I would call a significant role.
Generally speaking, you don't keep PR updated on every little detail of a project because it's just not necessary for them to be filling in customers on every tiny detail of the production process and doing so can be extremely counter-productive. This isn't a time-critical project in the conventional meaning of the phrase. End users were treating it like one and demanding information because so many of them had foolishly counted on ASICs being available before the reward halving.
The company made a rod for its own back by announcing unrealistic timelines in an attempt to dominate the ASIC pre-order market. Once it started giving explanations (real or fabricated) for date slips, end users then felt entitled to constant updates and BFL got locked into the "just a little further" game. While it could certainly be argued that customer retention is part of PR's role and that reassurance that their needs will be met soon is one aspect of that, PR often creates illusions with smoke and mirrors and they often don't need hard facts to do that.