The explanation is PR horse****.
It's pretty clear what's caused it, two factors: J.E. Sawyer and Twitter outrage, and now you've empowered a crazy person to come after you more and even stronger:
This was a rather great great post by a developer from a few days ago as to what "outrage culture" like this does to creative writing, specifically in relation to his game: http://elysianshadows.com/updates/how-recent-outrages-made-me-question-my-writing/
Now I'm going to constantly have to ask myself what design decisions and what writing, plot or questlines have been dumbed down and altered for the sake of "not offending anyone", what parts of the world ignore common sense for the sake of "inclusivity" and what topics will deliberately not be touched upon for the same reasons.
This is all rather perplexing, because the last game by Obsidian I played had fetus nazi zombies in it and giving the player the ability to perform abortions (last I remember nazis killed lots of people and abortion is a rather contentious topic) and even PoE has allusions and plot elements regarding genocide, rape, prejudice, matricide etc. What else will you remove from the game because someone felt "triggered" or decided to throw a Twitter ****storm?