Thing is, Naoki Yoshida already responded a couple of times to this issue. The most recent being:
Quote:
The dev team is actually split up into a bunch of smaller teams, each dedicated to a certain facet of the game. Off the top of my head, there’s the scenario team, the world settings team (including seasonal events), the item team, the crafting and gathering team, the battle team, the level design team, the art team, the character team, the BG team, the UI team, and so on and so forth. Each team focuses on certain game content or a particular system, and all teams’ tasks are ongoing simultaneously.