Yikes, this was the original version of my post above (I love to re-edit) and now it's too late to delete it. HN was having some problems when I was posting it

Yikes, this was the original version of my post above (I love to re-edit) and now it's too late to delete it. HN was having some problems when I was posting it, which must be why it's not on my threads page. If an editor can delete it, that'd be appreciated. But so that this comment isn't content-free, let me tell you where I first saw a project in the "cycle of despair" I mentioned in a reply above. It's Daikatana. I worked on the legendarily-late PC game in late 1999 as a contract programmer. It was basically this kind of syndrome, trickling down through the development team. John Romero was and has always been extremely ambitious and enthusiastic. He promised way more than the team he could round up was able to deliver. And that's understandable simply because he had a standard of technological feasibility that was based on John Carmack. That'll skew anybody's perspective. Okay, it was also ludicrous to base the game in four entirely distinct environments. But I think the basic problem was this cycle of overambition leading to overpromising leading to overcommitment leading to overstressed developers.