This is quite a strange and misleading statement which i have read before in these forums and my apologies for quoting just a small part of your post.
I won't go into CDPR's PR strategy cause that's something i don't know any details about. I will agree with you that Chris Priestly's infamous post was over the line. But saying that these forums being a place where we couldn't talk about the hypothetical downgrade is absolutely false.
A huge amount of threads in these forums go into dowgrade talks for the past year or so and as far as i can tell, being a member of these forums for quite a long time, nobody ever prevented people to speak their minds and sometimes even crossing the line themselves.
Let me just say i don't agree with the decision not to show ultra because i always thought that it was better to throw all your cards on the table from the start. But i've never seen anyone being denied the right to speak their mind, disagree or even accuse CDPR of various strategies in these forums.
The only people that get i've seen get warnings or get banned are people talking badly against other members.