I totally understand your frustration man. I totally feel it too.
But you're way off on the making money thing. Take Two has lost money on that MLB deal. Has been from Day 1. Last year was really bad because sales suffered. Realistically, it's hard to think that anyone could have expected the game to be awesome this year. I don't know of one game that made as much of a leap in quality in one year. Especially in a sports game. People think NFL2K5 was suddenly good. That's so not true. A lot of what it so good was in 2K4 if not 2K3.
You're ignoring that the reset was 2K9. 2K7 and 2K8 were in Kush's hands. Kush imploded and left the remains for VC to clean up. VC has only a couple of months to put together 2K9 from what was left of 2K8.
Because the contract with the MLB would make it financially impossible to do that with very little gain. I would be willing to bet that there are MANY people in Take Two that wanted to do this. It's the nature of the sports video game business. If you miss a year, it almost kills your franchise. Period. Ask EA how close they came to killing Madden by missing 96. If it weren't for Sony dropping the ball and being only on 1 platform, the game would have been over.
They lose more than the lost sales. The MLB wants it's money. If they don't put out a title, they are essentially "fined" millions of MORE dollars.
Again, my friend, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I feel your frustration because I'm right there with you. I'm just saying it's not so black and white of a situation. It's not an easy situation for anyone involved frankly. There are no words to make you feel "better' about it either. Just try to see more of the positives. They HAVE to put out a game. They HAVE to show that they are putting in the work to make it a great game. I think that is happening. I think it's pretty clear that 2K10 is much better than 2K9. I have faith that the developers will want to continue to improve the game significantly as we move forward. There is hope and the difference between 2k10 and 2k9 is proof of that.