LOL, Shai

In all seriousness, there is almost certainly some cross-over between teams. Most teams have a few "super-awesome-people" that can do most anything, and get thrown at the whatever the current priority is. Then there are the "worker bees" that plug along on a particular team, and churn out the majority of the work, dotting i's and crossing t's.

So, the fact that the battle system IS a priority does have an impact on other parts of the game. These teams don't work in complete stove-pipes (or if they do / did, it explains the current situation a bit). Yoshi-P has finite resources (in terms of people), each with their own skills, so working on one thing will definitely mean not working on something else.

At this point in the game, I'm back on the fence as to whether it's really been worth it waiting these extra months while the battle system has been revamped, and content has been delayed. Back in November, Tanaka-san told us that the first patch of 2011 would have : player run companies, company-owned ships, company-owned buildings, addition of a delivery service to the markets, hamlet defense battles, among others. All of this has been delayed. I'd rather not see further delays in order to rebuild the economy by replacing the current markets with an auction house.

CONTENT!

And, just for reference, my "credentials" for saying this : I have a Master's in Mathematics, and am an algorithm developer and system analyst for a team of ~30 people that work on a software product. Granted, it's not game development, and I acknowledge the likely differences, but corporate cultures generally seem to be the same ~_~