That ESPN article w/ the Verts was written on November 15th (3 days before the draft, and took research to discover). It's not data sourced from a table.
As far as 2K being lazy - there are a lot of people who throw that term around and it couldn't be further from the truth. A BAD roster editor (or group of editors) is still putting in hundreds (if not 1000+) of hours of work. There's a difference between being "lazy" and "inefficient". Work ethic isn't 2K's problem.
I think in general people underestimate how time consuming roster editing is. Most of 2K's editing is processed in bulk, rather than focusing on individuals. They'd want a list of official Verticals so they can update them across the board, rather than having to rely on Google guesswork for each individual player.
You can see from my post time stamps that I spent about 40 minutes working on ratings & badges for Edwards. Lets say I spent 10 minutes of that typing up my post - it took about 30 minutes to effectively rate & grade a player and also update my roster & database.
Now multiply that by 30 first rounders. That's 15 hours. That might not seem like a lot, but it definitely is.
There are 500 players in the NBA at all times. That's 15,000 minutes. 250 hours. There are 168 in a week. We sleep about 42 hours per week. Eating and all the other life functions.
One could spend a month editing and then be wildly out of date once games are being played. Now factor in the financial costs (salaries) that would accrue from keeping up this way.
It ain't like 2K is out here playing Minesweeper rather than updating rosters. They work around the clock, it's just a substantial amount of data to crunch.