One of the issues I have with Paradox is that they seem to put far more time, money and effort into trailers than they put into actual games or DLC. I understand that marketing is important but this just looks lazy.

Does the trailer has anything to do with gameplay or the feature? No, it doesn't. It's part of an empty hype that might inspire our imagination so we would implement ourselves something into the game that we hoped would be there via the DLC. What are we really paying for: a flashy short clip or a game we could actually play?

Espionage !
At last !

They're obviously taking ideas from mods for their DLCs. Its like they're chasing after ideas.

Yesterday I've began a Birch World run on modded Stellaris. I'm basically a god empire trying to wipe out every other race on the Galaxy. I'm the late game final boss the AI has to defeat.

Having espionage (stations) in the vastness of space seems ... impractical (read impossible).
Besides, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography can guarantee a secure A <-> B communication that has the means to detect eavesdropping and much more.

Actually, it has a lot to do with it. There is an ascension perk that allows a (player) empire to evolve into an end game crisis which feeds it endless hunger for dark matter by eating other people's stars. You know, like the exact thing happening in the trailer.
Also, the first part of the trailer looks like a simple allusion to the espionage mechanics they have been previewing for the last few weeks. Right up to the point where it raises the stakes and goes somewhere else.

But I realize pointless bitching while having no clue is so much more modern.

no way
hope it wont be as shitty as hoi4's

and they should do something with the battles ,those are superlame

Hacking and espionage are extremely seldom about brute forcing channels of communication or encrypted data. Even today, something as simple as a AES-256 encryption would guarantee safe communication between two parties, provided they can keep the key secret. Keeping the key secret is the real art though. Between inside jobs, social engineering and clever exploitation of local infrastructure, that can become surprisingly difficult.

That aside, Stellaris at no point went for the completely realistic approach and always tried to allude to a wide variety of common science fiction concepts and cliches.

My psionic god empress riding her pet space dragon approves of this comment.

So you have spies and paid informants instead.

Yeah but if you noticed there are heaps of games which do the same thing, fantastic trailer (quite a few launch trailers are like this) but very little to no gameplay...

It's an expansion to the nearly half a decade old grand strategy game by Paradox. The keyword "grand strategy" especially when followed by "Paradox" should give almost everyone a very solid idea of how this plays and looks like. That already divides humanity in the two halves of "tell me more" and "never".
if you need more than that, just about every video you find of the game over the last five years will give you a rough idea. If you need details, the weekly dev diaries on the official forums give you much more than some trailer ever could.

Aaaand another DLC for Stellaris...

How about merging the already released DLCs into a big expansion with a lower price for those who don't have all DLCs, yet?

They gotta milk the Paradox Defenders somehow. So, there will never be a definitive edition with all the DLC's until many, many years later.

I would say that is never applicable to "Paradox Defenders" because those are most likely to have bought the expansions when they came out and would never benefit from any consolidated expansions.

That said, the base game and previous expansions are usually heavily discounted when a new one releases and whenever I eyeballed that base game + previous expansions seemed to have been aroundish constant, with some uncertainty when one of the newer expansions was received very well or badly.