Bioware's management seems pretty damn dumb....They didn't even know the scope of the game until years in.
One thing that may not be apparent to the outside, but this is quite common in the industry and for multitude of good reasons. Most games start with an ambitious vision (if often quite ambigous), but the actual game is tens of thousands of hours of simply answering questions about what it is in practice (and working together with budget limitations, technical restrictions, learning from things that sound good when spoken, but simply don't work in practice etc.) and executing towards what seems to be the vision.
There's very few game productions ever where you can safely say that you undestand the real scope of the game and the production. Even those with supposed "auteurs" who are supposed to know exactly how things are supposed to be, are actually productions where these creative people have an idea, developer's execute it and it rarely is ready (or in most times even good) on the first time, so you iterate, iterate and then iterate some more until it works. That leads to a lot of changes during production like director's making a change to a mechanic and then the entire production team having to accomodate for that change, not because the original vision wasn't applicable, but after actually having to get hands-on time with the results, the director(s) can realize there's an even better option (which of course costs time and money outside of the original budget, so you cut scope elsewhere or add time and money). Trying to plan for N amount of iteration cycles for thousands of features (where N can be between 1-100 with no realistic average that you can actually use) is somewhat futile and you have to be comfortable with living with that uncertainty when planning game production.
Many of us have gone through enough cycles of shipping games (or updates/features) where the main takeaway has been "we just need design to do more work in the beginning and plan everything and we need to know the work and scope beforehand" and that almost always creates more issues and worse games. Understanding that what you envisioned, planned and scope will inevitably fail and has to accomodate for what you learn in produciton, and working with that to reduce the most important unknowns/uncertainty step-by-step is what leads to great games (and in this case, you can obviously see that they really struggled with that while having a huge pressure of moving forward with "a game" regardless and not being able to solve vision issues before attaching a production team to the project).
