Probably because it’s a fairly common response from us directly. We’re planning for a long life cycle for Last Epoch, so whenever a question is asked of “could ‘x’ happen”, the answer is almost always “maybe”, the future is a very long time. Accessibility such as subtitles is certainly something we want, but subtitles don’t help if the game doesn’t even work. While we certainly understand and appreciate different people’s priority for different items, there are currently higher priority items such as ensuring the core game works. Items like accessibility are “on the list” because they’ll be scheduled in once the people who would be able to complete them aren’t working on something higher priority.
The story can iterate quite considerably in Beta - and while some lines are more final than others, it’s the same reason we’ve held off on as much voice acting - so we don’t have to do all the VA only to re-do it with changes later (VA is surprisingly expensive). Most VA is in chapter 9 our most recent and up to standards chapter, with little bits before them.
The last thing I would say is that subtitles are not so simple a task. There isn’t a checkbox for “put dialog as subtitles”. We have to create a subtitle system, ensure it has correct timings, ensure it doesn’t have any bugs, make sure its versatile for all lengths of text, make sure it supports localization as that’s another one of our list items, ensure it doesn’t cause any interaction issues since a number of cutscenes are in-game, and things I’m not even thinking of yet. There’s also not currently a lot of a dialog or cinematics aside from chapter 9 to have subtitles for - mainly just the quick opening character cutscene, and “Fools, FOOLS!” - though this will likely change as we continue to update chapters to our current standards.
We absolutely want accessibility options in the game, however for us it’s currently not higher priority than some other items such as ensuring players can enter monoliths reliably in multiplayer. I most certainly understand that different people have different priorities, and I apologize that this is higher priority for you and we’re not able to get to it yet. At the very least, I can say “yes, it’s on our list”.