[BrentRitterbeck]

It could be that there is a very large disconnect between those promising features and the team that ultimately decides on whether or not something is good enough to ship.

Let's say that the front office (those doing the selling) start promising tons of features because they want to really sell this thing. Perhaps those features might be a little more complex than the "visionaries" first imagined. Now the expectations have been set.

The engineers try to meet those expectations. They try their best, but then it gets to QA. The people doing QA really care about their job, about the quality of what is being released, and they do a good job poking holes in things trying to get it to a quality that was promised. QA sends it back, but the developers have moved onto producing new features. Bug fixes are not cool. Sometimes doing it right is hard. Things start to slow down.

The end product is something that doesn't quite meet the expectations and is late...just a guess though.