I would think that this engineer's ideas of how things were going to change were mistaken. I don't know the insides of this case, but generally, the impact you have on the game you work on depends on three things:

- the trust and empowerment that project leads give non-lead staff

- the amount of non-lead stuff with a voice

- the ability of said leads to have a say in how the project is run

In this case, the leads remained, the project owner (the publisher) remained, and doesn't sound like the staff increased much if at all; so I really doubt things would change much in that sense. Given what happened, someone thought that something in the studio/project had to change, but I just doubt it would be the presence of staff's voice.