That was expected imo, not a surprise.
PBC having its own mini league at 147, it's not their interest to give the rival's fighter shine by letting him beat their better known names like Swift or Porter. Arum isn't trying his very best to get those fights to Crawford either. It's like both of them would have accepted that the earliest this fight will happen will be when PBC is ready with its mini tournament. If everything is going fast then that can be next year.
Spence and Porter winner vs Thurman vs Pac winner, after that there's no sensible fight for the winner other than Crawford, except if the winner would retire (if Pac would somehow come out on top) or move up in weight (a possibility with all Spence Thurman and Porter...).
We're living in the age of in house fight fever. I know it's like that for decades but nowadays especially. All these promoters and channels are so damn scared to lose their investments that they rarely if ever letting their meaningful fighters to fight other meaningful fighters from different promotions/channels. No promoter is exception, Arum with his allergy to let his fighters in the WBSS or that time when he made the same fights over and over again at 147 at the beginning of this decade.
Or PBC with not letting Tank anywhere near to a fighter who's not in house even if that means that they feed him 126ers cause they haven't got anybody other than Tank at 130.
If Top Rank would hold the cards at 147 and let's say Spence would be the only one being with PBC we would have a different conversation. Similarly if PBC would hold all the cards at 160 and let's say Jacobs or GGG would be the only one with DAZN we would have a different conversation there too.
Some of the few relevant cross-house fights from last year what I can recall were mandatories and that's the only reason why they happened (Gvozdyk vs Stevenson, GRJ vs Jojo)
there are a few exception like Fury vs Wilder II if it really does happen in February or Hooker vs Ramirez a few weeks later.