Well they say all PR is good PR....
As the guy who actually wrote the original WDS Post, I can say that that the intention was not to build a War in the East competitor.
The full post is here:
https://www.wargamedesignstudio.com/2020/12/30/2020-end-of-year-update/Here is the applicable FULL paragraph, which was not fully quoted in the Wargamer post:
Panzer Campaigns has been a hive of activity and we are extremely fortunate to have three teams that are actively working on games. There are six (!) games currently in various stages of development. A new team member, Daniel Asensio is working in partnership with Cesar on a large Eastern Front title. Dani had done a huge amount of work before approaching the WDS team and is filling a nice gap in the Panzer Campaigns timeline.
Mike Prucha and Dave Michas already had their next title mapped out before Scheldt ’44 was completed. Both are real dynamos, with Mike already having much of the order of battle done and David having completed the largest ever standalone Panzer Campaigns map. The map is over 851,000 hexes in size and for comparison, the previous biggest was Moscow ’42 at just under 244,000 hexes. To blow everyone’s mind on the scale, the following image covers 929,000 hexes, so the new map is equivalent to a big hunk of Russia!Contiguous Eastern Front Maps:

The statement in
red was left out of report which makes it clear that the composite map shown was to show an equivalent sized map to the one being worked on. The bolded statement was the applicable one for the following image.
So in summary, we are working on a monster 851,000 hex map that is the biggest ever Panzer Campaigns map and
comparable to all the previous Russia maps (excluding Stalingrad) combined. No where do we say this new map is even in Russia...
So I hope that clarifies. Panzer Campaigns is the wrong engine for a WITE equivalent game and if we go down that path we will use an engine that is appropriately featured.
Thanks,
David