Are you being ironic? It's hard to tell on the web.
Of course I've been ironic.
I used the same hyperbole as some others did in pretending to "know" what was going on behind the scenes. ("Oh, it was not HIS fault, it all was the marketing!")
Regarding the "too early" state of the game upon release, none of us knows how much this influenced his/the development team's decisions and ideas.
Knowing quite something about projects under time/budget restrictions, I know that the most important part is to concentrate on the core ideas. Anything else can be added later.
But the core should work.
The very core of Shafer_5 was "1upt". The whole game is designed around this basic idea. It influences really anything in this game.
And this didn't work too well. The AI was (and is) not capable of getting the principles, was (and is) not capable of doing the necessary calculations in time and a meaningful manner.
THAT is what a good designer would have tried to avoid.
"1upt" should have worked from the get go. Everything else was just candy on the cake.
But even the candy (let's talk about "diplomacy" or the tech-tree, eh?) didn't taste well.
The game is a showroom example of what not to do when releasing a game. Even more so when this game is a sequel for a franchise of almost 20 years.