It gives me the blues to hear this, being familiar with your talent and the quality of your work through Medium, YouTube and your Heidegger book.
It looks like this is a problem at their end, not yours. They are afraid of risk, but don't want to admit it. I see this fear manifesting in many places. It's why movie studios have been sticking to proven brands, as one example.
I'm (was?) a grant writer, freelancing for modest but solid non-profit organizations. Grants have been drying up. Foundations and individual donors don't accept grant applications like they used to. (I could explain why, but it'd take paragraphs.)
My business starts with identifying possible grantors. I have to charge for that whether or not I find any prospects. Every year over the last 20 years, the list of prospects gets shorter. Now I'm lucky to find a few I think are worth applying to. I have to charge for writing the grant application. My success rate has declined, because too many nonprofits are pursuing too few grants, but I still need to get paid for my work. I hate taking money from nonprofits serving people in need if I can't bring in grants to more than offset my charges.
I used to work in PR. Those people face very similar constraints. Just as book publishers want the next Harry Potter, the media are loath to gamble on risky unknowns, so PR people don't want to invest their time unless they're confident of success for themselves and their clients.
PR people have to market their services with some level of optimism, some promise of success, in order to get business. PR people are optimistic by nature, so they are willing to try, but of course they need to get paid regardless of the results.
It sounds like your question threatened to puncture their public face and/or pushed them into a corner. I'd equate your question with the question "what are my prospects of success with you?" If they think it's a long shot for you and them, they're unlikely to tell you directly. They would be embarrassed to do so, and doing so might travel by word of mouth and hurt perception of their services in the market. So instead they turn away.
On the hopeful side, Peter Jackson in an interview talked about people coming to him to intern with him to get into the movie business. He sounded a little exasperated by it. He said to them "the way to get into the movie business is the way I did -- by just making movies until I made an impact."
Similarly, you probably know Harry Potter was rejected by a dozen publishers before one finally took the risk. It's a crazy, dysfunctional world we live in now. The business world is hunkering down in their bunkers because of it, and making the dysfunction worse.
