At least this time they are organizing this modding summit, something I believe they never did before. It seems CA is unhappy with the current state of modding. Until Empire the community could always hack their way into the game and produce the desired total conversion mods, even without the ever promised tools, so there was no need for CA to really release them.
And although I remember an article from 2003 that, the never released, mod tolls will ship with R:TW, the game itself turned out to be as modable as they said so I don't consider their past record as that bad.