In the days since, it became clear that we failed to
fulfill what I consider one of our most important
responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly.
They keep focusing on the fact that their TOS wasn't clear. I think it was very clear that they were trying to grant themselves a lot of privileges to use people's photos.
Agreed, I don't think they could have been any more plain that they were claiming the right to license your photos to anyone for anything. I think people understood that clearly, including National Geographic, who put their account "on hold" due to the TOS.
Yes. All their answers have been polite ways to say "you are a bunch of stupid people who don't understand basic grammar". That's sad.
But, to be honest, I don't know what else they could have said or done. They probably shouldn't be fully transparent and say "we tried a way to shear the sheep and the sheep did overreact, let's try another way".
They could have taken the blame for meaning one thing, saying something else entirely, and apologizing to their users for all that alarm that their clumsy TOS justifiably provoked.
This could be followed with a brief account of how they actually see advertising working on the site (hopefully it's not stupid or creepy), making a retraction of the bad terms, and saying that they'll be revising the terms to support this direction and this direction only.
Finally, they may want to acknowledge that users have every right to value their IP highly, and that Instagram knows that while their service is popular, it doesn't justify the kind of liberties that the bad TOS was taking with IP that isn't Instagram's in the first place, and what they're really focused on is a trade that everyone sees as fair. They can add that they appreciate people's patience as they take the time to get the exchange right.
That's exactly what "not clear" means. They are claiming that their intentions were not the same as what people thought upon reading their terms. Now, they could be lying about their intentions, but I suppose there's no way to prove that either way.
No "not clear" means that you (and possibly even a judge) can't understand what rights the license grants. "Unnecessarily sweeping" would seem to be a better description here than "not clear" assuming their intentions were as they say.
The license is not really the place to explain intentions except where they place limits on rights but to define who has what rights. A blog post or a preamble about how the rights they receive will be used is more reasonable for that.
