I suspect part of it was the politics of the business...the publisher forces a specific release date or threatens to drop the project. It's an ugly business from what I've seen of it.
The other part would be what caused it to get to that point, both in taking so long to develop and in not having it in better shape, but as those two things boil down to coding, logic, and compatibility of tools (ie: making it workable for a majority of diverse systems), I suspect there's no real way to pinpoint a completion date. They might have done better to cut their losses on some things in order to get a tighter game, but would have pissed off more players who then wouldn't have met the standards for processor/sound/video/ram/etc.
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