No, I don't think that. Ian comes off to me as the sort of person who really relishes this challenge. I think every obstacle motivates him more.
BTW: I have to thank you now for this post, because I think it, in and of itself, is helping Ian make a better game
Right there, what you're missing is that, unlike in the past, EA is moving toward a more efficient system of shared technology and tools across EA Sports developers and teams. This costs less in the long run than did developing each individual team's technology.
Also, investing in these tools is not something a developer is likely to shirk on. It's a cost saving maneuver because it puts more and more control in the hands of the producers... developers that may or may not be familiar with all that goes on under the hood... rather than forcing everything on the engineers.
Blizzard, quite clearly from their track record, does not deal with the deadlines that EA does. If EA could delay Madden 17 times a year, then yeah, it'd come out a lot better product. The NFL would not allow that.
Then there's the "too many cooks" factor. At some point, adding more people to a project only slows down or complicates the process. It's not like a manufacturing job where more people means more products being produced... you can't make a second assembly line when working with a single source code. And every time the code gets changed, the master must be saved. If 3 dozen people are working with code at a given time, how many times are we going to see changes get overwritten? That's a fairly simplistic wait to look at it, but it illustrates the point in a sort of abstract way.
Ian and Phil's greatest resource is himself and his team. He knows this. He's never made the excuse "I don't have time" or "I don't have the people". Time is a given... there are only so many hours in the cycle, you can't change that.
All that was required for the jump in quality we've
already seen is a change in personnel. Competence, vision, and determination count for a lot. EA doesn't have to spend a bunch of money to upgrade the people making the game. They just need to put the right people in the right place. David Ortiz wasn't the right people.
If I've seen nothing else that makes me believe in these guys, it's professional pride. These guys believe they are the best at what they do, and they're doing everything they can to prove it.
We know they have the vision (based on the technical changes they've been working on), we know they have determination (based on the sheer number of changes they've made this year), but competence is up in the air until we see a final product (though I think Michael Young has proven himself).
I think you're putting too much stock in upper management. And you're assuming the problem was upper management to start with. I know that's been the running theme for several years now... it's the suits... I don't buy it. Who signs the paychecks has nothing to do with how well I do my job. If I'm surrounded with good people, I'll make a great product. Once again, and this is my opinion and nothing more... I think David Ortiz and others like him at Tiburon were the problem, not EA in general.