At that point, Kathleen Kennedy said that they were still in the middle of talking about the text crawl, as well as other elements of the Star Wars franchise, and which parts should be limited to the main storyline.
Discussing the opening text crawl appears to have been a fairly significant point of conversation for the movie.
It would appear that while conversations started a long time ago, finding an answer was not a simple process.
Gareth Edwards tells Empire Magazine that the first meeting that mentioned not having it took place six months before filming began.