Good article (if older), but it gets one thing wrong:
And that leads to the next point: There’s more going on than is revealed in patch notes. Development of new content, fixing of of old content, testing, and optimization, all occur continually. Just because the people who post the patch notes didn’t just copy the entire work schedule of the several hundred people on the staff doesn’t mean these things aren’t happening.
That's wrong. Every single line of code change I make at work (and there are sometimes over 1k per week just bugfixing) has a comment in the version control detailing which bugs it is exactly supposed to fix or which features it is implementing. Every single bug has a detailed history linking it to code changes and who did what, when, why.
If it was requested by our clients, we could easily give them a run-down of every single bug fixed, when it was fixed and how much time it took, among other things.
That's how proper software development works.
The result looks pretty much like these patch notes for Apache 2.3 web server (http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/CHANGES_2.3), and it includes every single change, even minuscule ones like "Change provider name from "shared" to "shm" to match module name."
There is no reason why we couldn't get the same attention to details in the patch notes from game developers.