I've been doing software development for 16 years for a product that has 800,000 seats. There is one thing you never say which I heard from the Madden team on several occasions.
Never make excuses to the customer. "That's really hard", "It takes a long time", etc. etc. That's just opening the door to embarrass yourself. Yes, developing GOOD software is hard, but that's why you get paid what you get paid. You are expected to do it and do it in a timely manner. No excuses. Yeah, I realize you are putting in tons of hours, working hard and it can be frustrating to hear the complaints and the criticism. You have to put yourself in the customer's shoes. They don't want to hear that crap nor should they care. If you had to re-write Madden because the code was a disaster, that's not the customer's fault. They don't care who was running things and what not. They shouldn't care, it's your company and your product and quite frankly, it hasn't been a good product for a long time.
Just because people on here don't have programming experience, doesn't mean they don't know what they are talking about.