So, yes, there may be a breakdown in terminology here. When I hear someone say they “demand” something from someone, for ex.

In some cases one, in other cases the other, so that might be what you're reading. In at least one of these cases, we're talking about consumer demand, what I want as a customer, the customer is always right, yadda yadda.

I’m hearing that you want legislation to require offline play.

Legislatively, I support what SKG is after. My personal desires are for more than that, because the product doesn't offer enough value to me compared to one that works offline from day 1. And I think whether customers can articulate that well enough or not, they're making a similar evaluation of the product in front of them, which explains the culture around people making a lot of noise about Steam charts, prematurely declaring "dead games", and so on. A game like this one that launches as anything other than a phenomenal success looks like a bad investment if other people didn't already sign on in droves.

Agreed, and there’s no legislation requiring devs to lay out their plan ahead of time, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the people to demand that information.

Without legislation, they could tell me the offline binary is ready to release and all they have to do is hit the button, but I'd have no reason to believe them.

By releasing a dedicated server binary for a game, you are inviting a fractured playerbase.

This is exactly why I believe it wouldn't fracture very far. It's going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.

As for the intended experience, how much does it bother developers that their customers play offline games with mods? Or back in the day we'd use cheat codes. Grand Theft Auto always had missions, but for at least the first four iterations of it, it was more of just a chaos sandbox where people would ignore the main throughline. My favorite way to play Factorio is with aliens turned off. Devs have all sorts of ways to tells us what the intended experience is, but deviating from that should be our choice. I'll get more value out of a game that doesn't take that away from me, and I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one. It's why Rockstar hired all of those roleplay server folks to officially integrate it into GTA6. The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.