But they're not, of course. Sure, I don't want my internal thoughts floating around, but I'm not a) several thousand people, and b) the personification of those several thousand people attempting to work out the best way of extracting other people's sub-conscious & internal motivations and desires, and sell them to marketers ... so my perspective is skewed.
The rest of the excuses in TFA seem very 'some people say...' or 'it's been said that...' style posturing, which may be an interesting academic exercise, but as you say it feels a bit of a cop-out to use that as a post-rationalisation.
Why couldn't a discussion about the future (features? :)) of Facebook could not be open if it's such a big and far reaching platform? What's to hide?
Media would have hard time feeding on it, compared to the current situation where it is all interesting and whatever because some "secret" "leaked" and therefore it is "newsworthy".
BUUUUUUT (a) Bosworth is at the top of his org, so calling his own post a "not quite staw man" is a ridiculous cop-out. Like it doesn't have 1000x the weight of the comments below. And (b) The reason people are being forced to interrogate Facebook's "character" through internal docs is because a lack of candor has made that character impossible to judge based on public statements and actions. You did it to yourself, man!