If you don't know why fans are targeting DST with so much negativity, why are you being so negative?
What we've been doing for the last year is working on the long list of protoypes I mentioned above. They are not the only items we are working on, so they are not the full focus of our entire team, but we have several freelance artists and two different product managers working on them at any given time. The new ship has been in the works a lot longer than a year, but our initial prototyper had some health issues, so we had to transfer the project to a new designer. That same designer was already working on, as far as I know, the RBoP and the all-new paint scheme for the NX-01, so finishing those took precedence.
Chuck just said why he didn't announce a name in advance, but our current policy is not to show anything until a prototype is completed and (in most cases) fully approved. We also like to have the cost confirmed by the factory, in case we need to adjust anything beforehand, although that is not always the case, either. To show a work in progress, unapproved, is another way to disappoint fans, especially if a product changes significantly in the prototype phase. Old, in-progress pictures will be held up as reasons that the final product is somehow deficient or inferior. Plus, announcing the ship with a picture of it is much more exciting, and better than two less-exciting reveals, name and picture.
We currently use CBS-provided artwork for our packaging, and our own photography of our ships, so I'm not sure why getting artists to paint new, photo-realistic pictures of the ships on new space backgrounds would improve anything, be it packaging or advertising. It would be more work and expense, and would only slow any releases down -- if the point is to move faster, investing more work in the packaging is not going to accomplish that.
And changing the name of the line makes no sense. Why would we need to change the name and start fresh? I'm not even sure what that would accomplish. It would be like relaunching a comic series with #1 to boost sales, which we don't really need, and most people criticize. Plus, we'd be making the line harder to find. It wouldn't come up in the same searches as older ships, and you'd also get back results for any number of books. "Ships of the Line" is a pretty broad naval term, and doesn't mean a lot to most people who don't live and breathe Star Trek (or seacraft), in my personal estimation. But everyone knows what a Starship is, and what a Legend is.