Its worth mentioning that the 12 years was not at all productive. The first 6 years was basically just two guys with rough concepts, only 6 years of actual dev time. Then about 3 years in they got a new creative lead on the project who decided to scrap essentially everything and start from scratch on a whim. Then the devs get the release date the same time we do which is 2 years earlier than they expected having assumed that they'd get around 5 years of actual dev time since being made to start over.

So yeh there was a lot of screwing around by management.