Regarding ship times, it seems to depend on the industry as well as commercial vs enterprise software as well. New products and old products make a difference

Regarding ship times, it seems to depend on the industry as well as commercial vs enterprise software as well. New products and old products make a difference as well. On new products, I think you are generally correct but on established products companies can get by doing this. The first company I worked for professionally was enterprise software and the market leader in the space had a tendency for years to knowledgeably ship poor quality products at specific times either due to legal reasons or financial reasons. They would try to staff up for releases and use contractors and all sorts of techniques to actually make the releases semi-legitimately. There was an unspoken acknowledgement not to use those versions though (actually I think they actually put a sleeve in the DVD saying not to install it in production once and to wait for the next point release coming in 2 months). I left them and became their customer and currently use 7 year old versions because the latest versions break things we need but its known that you never install their shipping version and wait for at least the first service pack. I know in one case some customer contract/government mandate specified releases must be made by end of calender year so regardless there was a release regardless of current state of the project. The other cases were usually financial and it was due to something like if the DVDs physically shipped by end of quarter then revenue could be recognized in that quarter. Since this is enterprise the customer may or may not pay at that time since they are usually just paying yearly support but its the accounting games that are played that forced the time. In my current company we use standard accounting practices and our VCs have told us that if we are not using "creative" accounting we are doing it wrong so revenue recognition times or invoice time sneak in rather than collection time into the books.