It was expected, yes. It does not mean they weren't trying to fix it in the 11th hour. I woildnt be surprised if some core tech was unfinished or inadequate that lead to this.

>instead of going into valve time, they released it anyway, which means that you skipped the entire polish and optimisation part not only for the game itself but for half the engine as well.

Yup, welcome to game development when you have deadlines and no benevolent (or at least, apathetic) dictator paying your bills. It's unfortunate that we can trace this back to the 80's with ET, but this is simply the business realities. Game code isn't mission critical (and until recently, does not care about maintainability), and also isn't what sells the product.

So it never gets the time to be cultivated like other indistries. And people still buy anyway. It's a two way street of apathy and every publisher hopes it can slip under the cracks and not become the next Superman 64. Most manage to slip.

There's not much you can do about it with the current publishing structure, where most funders don't work in nor care about games. And the ones that do still see their money draining whenever the talk of delays come up. That won't be solved except with time as more industry trailblazers retire and shift to management (remember, Todd Howard is only in his 50's. Gabe and Kojima are 60. So many pioneers are still well under retirement age). Or for more truly indie teams to arise and learn how to scale up projects while staying lean. The latter is what I hope to do.