[pmjordan]

A lot of this stuff seems really obvious, but having worked in the game industry, the general view seems to be that "that would all be nice if we could do it". In particular, the quality feedback loop is often sorely missing. This is why there are so many mediocre to bad games. I suspect the reason for this disparity between theory and practice at most publisher-independent studios is some mixture between the iron grip of publishers on developers, and developers' reluctance to even try to do anything about it. Maybe I've missed something though, few of the politics ever seeped through to programmers. (apart from "you're not working hard enough")