I think a lot of the projects failings are because Chris Roberts has failed at managing both timelines and expectations. I understand that he is pushing his teams hard, but one thing I can relate to him is that in being a project manager, 9 times out of 10, things are going to go wrong and you have to either start from scratch or do a lot of rework in order to get your product delivered, and that usually means being late. In my working life, I have worked on projects that were 3 or 6 months late, which is exceptionally late in my line of work. Shit just happens. Hell, we launched a whole product line for manufacturing about 6 years ago and within 6 months we were redesigning the entire thing from the beginning because it didn't work. We were more concerned with getting the entire thing done rather than getting proper feedback from our customer to ensure that what we made them would allow them to make good parts. In the end it made us look like assholes who didn't care about quality.
So I can relate, it's hard managing expectations and still trying to ensure you put out a quality product in a reasonable time frame. Usually the best quality takes the most amount of time. In the end, if you put timelines and meeting expectations ahead of quality, you are just setting yourself up for failure. Sure, he has over promised and under delivered, but better than over promising and delivering an utter garbage product. SC has a long way to go, if they aren't having any issues with financials, I give it two years before the game even gets through beta, at the least. I have faith it will get done, it's just not going to be anywhere near when we expected it to be when we backed it.