This is one of the situations where everyone involved looks dumb and took an L.
Joell telling Joe to support an album that is likely going to contain a lot of Joe disses is delusional thinking. It’s also clearly a corny marketing angle from Joell and Crook to sell records.
Royce and Joe thinking because they didn’t explicitly turn down the deal means Joell and Crook should just wait around forever is also delusional. If I text a girl to hang out and she never responds, I’d kinda just assume she’s not interested and keep it moving right? She didn’t need to explicitly say no for me to get the hint.
Joe said he’d be interested in rapping with the group again, but not on Shady. But they’ve been off Shady for a year now and Joe hasn’t rapped with the group. If I’m Joell I would have simply asked “okay so what do YOU think an appropriate length of time without us making music together would be to assume the group was deaded?” 5 years down the line and Joe is still retired- can we assume at that point that the group isn’t getting back together? 10 years?
I think Joell and Crook just took the wrong approach. They should have just said that they want to rap together and Royce and Joe clearly don’t and they’re tired of waiting around for something that likely will never happen and need to move on so THEY (Joell and Crook) are leaving the group. Instead they’re blaming it on Royce and Joe and it becomes a “we never said we weren’t going to rap, we also didn’t do anything to remotely indicate that we were interested in doing so anytime soon tho” situation.