In my experience it usually boils down to delusions of grandeur. Stakeholders often think THE WORLD is watching this upcoming release, so they can't possibly al

In my experience it usually boils down to delusions of grandeur. Stakeholders often think THE WORLD is watching this upcoming release, so they can't possibly allow the team to ship without features X Y and Z ready. In reality, for the vast majority of launches very people are watching, and even fewer care about your features or lack thereof (that's just not how early-adopters think about products, in my opinion). If founders realized how little traffic / how few downloads they were going to get out of the gate, they'd ship much earlier; unfortunately everybody thinks their project is going to be a TechCrunch headline, and that's just not the case.