if I had not spent an entire career with clients sometimes telling me things that I told them that never happened, I would be more open minded. The reality is that whether people have lives ruined because of a serious injury or their loved one is a victim of a crime, the people receiving the communication are always in a very enhanced emotional state. They are dealing with lots of problems while trying to deal with a system that is not easy to understand.
And people generally want black-and-white answers to questions. The justice system is the last place to find a black-and-white answer. So if you give them a long nuanced, how this is going to go, what generally happens is they focus on/only hear a couple key points - which usually involves them hearing that you agree with the points that they like. It is human nature.
But I can tell you that when you get a result that is not exactly what the client wants, the knee-jerk reaction is often to blame the lawyers for not telling them this would happen, or for allowing this to happen because….. I have had clients tell me that I never told them about things I told them about. I often recorded initial interviews (with their permission), and several times I later played back the recording which totally refuted their claim. I seldom got an apology, just a less angry client.
And sometimes the lawyers do a shitty job of communication, and sometimes lawyers forget things, and sometimes lawyers lie and break a promise. Far more often it is a breakdown of communication caused by the clients not being lawyers and having to understand complex things while they are vulnerable and emotional. Add to that the fact that an appellate decision or new legislation can make everything you had told the client earlier totally or partially incorrect.
TL;DR While, you might be entirely correct, that is not the assumption that my decades of experience tells me is the most likely reality here. And yeah, it can also be a mix of bad communicating lawyer and poorly comprehending client or victim family.