They said, sorry not soon. That means...some day there WILL be shapeshifters.

Of course there will be shapeshifters in a year or two...this is Champions.
What are the devs doing?
They are laying the ground-work for going forward.
When Champs is fully mature 5 years from now, they will be able to make the following claim:

Instead of "Make that iconic superhero" it will be "Make any type of Hero you can imagine".
Because, the champions book game is already like that.
The Champions online game is striving to eventually be like that.
But you can't have bases, followers, NPCs, Vehicles, and stuff like that at launch, because that would mean Cryptic has spend five years developing Champions before launch.

I'd read that as saying, we know that it won't happen soon, but don't know what will happen in the more distant future. Surely they don't right now have a list of all of the features that will ever be added to the game.

And this sort of (deeply flawed) logic is why Devs would rather not talk to us at all .

I kinda like expectations being set somewhere in the realm of what they can deliver. The over-hyping of the game at the outset was a bit sickening.

The info about binding is great but what about the costume change emotes? Any chance of seeing them in the near future?