Indeed, but the man hours involved was quite surprising to me. Some work was per platform, some per cellular provider, some per country, etc.
Also it's less confusing for users if they can say "if you use signal, it's encrypted", unless of the confusing and hard to support decision tree, which is made doubly confusing because Signal uses phone numbers are part of your identity.
The virtue of it was that you could tell your less-clued-in friends and relatives to "just replace your SMS app with Signal and use it all the time", and they would; the hope being that mass usage would create a virtuous smokescreen of innocuous encrypted communication, so that people who actually had secrets to discuss would not stand out.
Perhaps this is less important now that idiosyncratic messenger apps seem to have become well-accepted? I don't know, anymore, how easy it would be for the NSA or some other evil adversary to single out Signal traffic.
Also it's less confusing for users if they can say "if you use signal, it's encrypted", unless of the confusing and hard to support decision tree, which is made doubly confusing because Signal uses phone numbers are part of your identity.