You can explore the project without the community manager, if there is whitepaper. The developers promised to submit the document in mid-January. I believe that next week we will see a whitepaper, and there will be answers to many questions.
Wish the whitepaper will available as planned so we can read it to make everything clear.
As we can see in other threads even with a whitepaper people still have a lot of questions. Of course, often other community members can answer them but it's still good to have someone of the team to clarify unanswered issues.
I think a whitpaper is essential for every project because is the document that explains what is all about. I hope we can have it next week.