The simple answer is changes to our schedule, and focus throughout the project.
Some weapons were either identified as being better used elsewhere in the game, or we prioritised solving for other things and simply reallocated our resource appropriately. The Sjorgen as an example was moved to feature as part of the 5v5 Content that we never released, along with many of the other weapons you listed, and some of the cosmetics. As I've talked about in the past, 5v5 behaved differently to the main game, the weapons were built to service only that mode and so there's an additional workload to be performed if we want to change how they're utilised. Same for the cosmetics, they were designed and tested for specific characters, and to meet our standards need to have no known issues when used on all characters, in all situations in order to be shipped.
They're otherwise not sitting there in a 100% complete state in the background, and we're not intentionally holding them back to create opportunity down the road. There's one exception to that I can think of today which is technically complete, but has a crippling bug associated with it that prevented it from featuring in Chapter 6. That ones actually been resolved now so I expect you'll see it in future updates.
Back to the topic at hand - in order to meet our design principles, Weapons need to have a full suite of available cosmetics, unlocks, assignments, appropriate data hooks, plus the complete battery of QA testing to eliminate as many potential issues that could arise from their addition to the game (not to mention considering balance implication and what value the weapon may hold to players when released). We may have specific roles in mind for what we expect that the weapon will provide to the game, meanwhile as a player often the preference is new = better than what I have, and smarter people than I have to find out the best way to navigate that tightrope and help to add content into the game that doesn't frustrate, but adds to the fun of playing.
All of this equals a need for dev time, and then separately but just as super important, testing time. We naturally already have a plan in place for the development of content (like The Pacific), which in turn has it's own testing needs. We work to Time budgets more than we do financial ones, and to focus on adding x into the game means compromising y. If we want to add the Sjorgen to the game in our next update, we need to reallocate resource away from other things that exist in the plan we have today, both in development and QA, to ensure that we're able to provide it. We therefore ask ourselves what's more important, ensuring quality or adding content. Lately, our focus has been ensuring quality.
So to then address the final aspect of your question with all that as context - it simply comes down to yes, we have this stuff and one day we'd like to see it come into the game just as much as you do. Today, I don't have those dates or any new/different promises to make around when you may get to see or play with them but I have no problem showing up today, sticking our hand up and saying that we have created parts of the issue itself by switching plans mid development or testing, and making the call to sacrifice potential content to focus on quality and delivering them vs. the plans already in motion and the content that's dependent on supporting those goals.
The other part of the issue of course is datamining - you being able to see things existing before we intend for you too isn't preferred, but you won't catch me placing any blame on folks like Temporyal, thats all on us. The responsibility is on us to ensure that you don't see things that aren't ready, and as our policy is never to comment on rumor or speculation, we won't typically engage with these types of specifics.
We've made one exception to that in the past year, and that was in relation to a Bomb that was thought to be coming as part of the Pacific content which very early on we decided didn't meet our standards of ensuring a proper sensitivity to the events of the Second World War and keeping that balanced with engaging gameplay. Otherwise, we simply don't comment on specifics.
There are some malicious folks out there in various different datamining communities, across many different games, but folks like Temporyal I find speak quite respectfully and clearly have a lot of passion for Battlefield. It's not ideal that they're in a position to show you shiny things, but without context for each of the things they find, you need to take advice they provide when they post this stuff and ensure you take it with a pinch of salt. We're a creative studio that will allocate time towards exploring the creation of content that may never reach the actual game, because often the creative process leads us to the production of something else that's greater, or we simply realise that whilst we are making a thing, that sometimes we're not actually adding to the fun so we drop it and move on. Sometimes, you find relics of that process.
That you're exposed to some of those exercises create a false expectation for you but our policy is to focus on talking to you about what we are doing, when it's cleared our testing phases and is being 100% committed into the game, vs. stating a repeated 'No' to everything that gets discovered. The act of Datamining creates more need to say 'No' and then creates a new need for us to dedicate time to explaining why it's a 'No'. I'm not opposed to us changing that behaviour and opening the door more on our creative processes so that you each get a better understanding on all of these things, but the most important priority for me is continuing to work to re-establish your confidence in where the game is today, and where it goes next - a topic we'll be discussing some other time.
(Thanks for the super respectful way you asked the question too /u/Astatine11 - tagged a lot of extra insight and context into this one as I can recognise the underlying frustration that creates the need to ask the question in the first place as I appreciate that the longer answers often attract greater attention).
I'll swing by later and answer any other questions I find related to that
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