I'm not sure that this really means anything, because there have been a lot of changes on the manufacturing front and it's reasonable that they'd take advantage

I'm not sure that this really means anything, because there have been a lot of changes on the manufacturing front and it's reasonable that they'd take advantage of the interruption to move to producing new lenses. In the past six months Nikon consolidated three lens manufacturing plants into one and moved their camera production to Thailand. At the same time they're also introducing two new dSLR models. So there will be new lenses manufactured. (and, it's worth noting that Nikon dSLRs still outsell Nikon mirrorless cameras)