Most people saw EQL and thought it was going to be EverQuests version of of THJ that they just decided to let Secrets and Rog run with since they have EMU experience and the EQ team is spread too thin right now to pull it off. For example Ngreth is literally crying on the official EQ forums that they might not even have all the Frostreaver features the community voted on built out in time for May 27th (Bst,Zerker shit mostly). It was a reasonable assumption that this was their version of THJ though.
Here's the problem, you can find here on these very forums a post from Secrets themselves with a mile long list of things they thought were wrong with THJ. If you read this list it clearly establishes that many of the things that made THJ great were not seen as a positive from Secrets perspective. In my opinion the success of THJ was something that Secrets did not understand and resented.
So we all thought we were getting a natural and official successor/improved version of THJ and that was a completely fair assumption when EQL was announced and multiclassing was the key feature announcement. The EQL team is simply not going to disabuse you of those assumptions because in doing so would lessen the hype.
The fact remains, and as I have said for weeks on here, this is not going to feel anything like THJ, and anyone who was hoping it would is going to be MASSIVELY disappointed.
Can you even call this a rug pull if you see it coming a hundred miles away?