Very fair point, thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely try to be more transparent in the future. In this case, I think what happened is that none of the mods saw the existing lemmy.ml instance as something that actually was large enough to matter or that was ever official, so from our view this was less "moving to another instance" than it was "we'll start out on lemmy.world, those of you that already gathered on lemmy.ml on their own, here's your FYI that we won't be going there".
I can definitely see how it came across differently, and how we might have underestimated the connection people already felt to the lemmy.ml instance. Sorry for that!
All good :P It definitely has a learning curve, especially if you're not used to lispy syntax