There is a bunch of different issues to unpack here:
Communication
Yes, the pbr work in general was communicated basically everywhere. The plan to change the factories specifically a lot less. I can see that it could easily be missed. I think nobody of the involved people expected such a strong reaction to the changed models, so they got the same attention to advertise them like most other changes did.
Of course there is a certain responsibility to communicate planned changes, but there is a sentiment sometimes where people simply refuse to keep themselves in the loop, but then are up in arms that we are "forcing" unwanted change on them. That's a bit unfair. If you feel so strongly about the game, please play some faf-develop once in a while or at least read the planned patchnotes. In general we make it really easy to get involved into testing upcoming changes. Almost nobody does, so it feels like wasted effort to speficially promote all kinds of changes as the turnout simply isn't there.
I don't want to dwell on who is responsible for the communication problems too much and I would rather talk about the
Factories
Yes, the original HQ models have a lot of technical issues (no animations, stretched textures etc.) and it is necessary to change them. I think during the development process we made the mistake to to conflate these technical problems with the concept of adding elements to the models. So we tried to only remove elements for the support factories and leave the "normal" models as the HQs. While it was worthwhile to explore this direction, reality showed that this is extremely hard to pull off with good results.
It has worked really well for the aeon air facs, but for others not so much.
It's challenging to come up with good solutions, as we can only reuse the exisiting textures, so we have to kitbash something out of the existing parts. And it gets even more complicated because the ambient occlusion is baked into the textures. Which means when we move parts they can look out of place. However, we will still have this problem to an extend when we remove parts of the model. At some point we will have to make compromises.
I think the way forward is to experiment more with adding or removing elements to find something that works best for that particular factory. We learned from the feedback that it is important to easily distinguish the factories, so we should have an emphasize on changing the outline of the factories to make this possible. Again, the aeon air facs do a good job here in my opinion.
We should also work with closer feedback loops, as creating all these changes does take a lot of effort, so we should seek fast feedback on model ideas even before all the animations are done.
A lot of people participated here, so I expect you to provide that feedback, so we have something to work with and this situation doesn't happen again in the next patch.