Yeah, the whole thing seems like they ran it past some focus group at the last minute, and someone said “ewww, I don’t like fuel. ewww.” and so they scrambled to rip out the offending code in an effort to appease the lowest common denominator.
Then again, the fact that so much supporting code was left in makes me think maybe they were leaving the foundations to replace the missing systems once the game was established/ I have hope :)