It's not factually inaccurate. Think about how millions of these systems are sold and then think about how many of the indies that are on these sizzle reels blow up to be huge successes because they were there.
I did just now. And I can think of several indie games that blew up by being on one of these stages in a quick reel. We even have several from this year! That one game that got made by that GamerGater got huge on a quick trailer.
The average consumer doesn't give a fuck about E3. It's why the conferences don't get huge viewing rates. It's why they're not on TV anymore. It's the definition of an enthusiasts show. Your average gamer isn't watching. Like I (And you) said, they probably get the information from news sources after the conferences, so they don't even know about the optics people are talking about. The average gamer has no fucking idea what was and wasn't on stage at Sony's conference. If they read an article they just know that it was available at some trade show.
Most of the write-ups are the week after, but they're also written based on the conferences. Writers for the average news publications aren't lingering at what amounts to a con for a week to wait in line to play games, it's not their thing. They go to the conferences and talk about what looked cool to them in trailers. If your game doesn't make the conference, then it's not getting written about except on gaming sites. That can severely hurt indie titles. Again, there's a reason companies show these games on stage.
Nobody needs extra marketing for Gran Turismo (which is why I thought it was a good idea to keep it in the pre-show). Games like Cuphead do need that marketing.
And Microsoft, or any other company for that matter isn't going to dedicate time to what is clearly a business failure. Claiming that they should is way dumber than anything Jim Ryan has said.
Ultimately I agree that Kinect, Move, etc... are business failures (even if I think they should still be supported to show you actually support your products), so why talk about indies in that same way? Why keep them from your main show the same way Vita started disappearing. Remember how that went? Slowly less and less appearances until it got branded a Legacy system, which just lets Sony justify mining its games for ports and then letting it die proper.
Ryan is stating that indies aren't a feature at their shows, I guess forever. I honestly can't think of a time when this meant anything good for whatever had been kicked off the stage.