Food For Thought About This Game's Current Development...

[Betelgeuzah]

There's amazingly many things wrong about everything in the OP but I'll just mention few:

Having said this, wouldn't it have made logical sense to have hired temporary extra developmental hands & focus everyone on key development issues of dire need first? Going from one area to the next.

What you can't seem to understand is that you don't simply throw more bodies at the problem for it to go away any faster. You don't simply bring people unfamiliar with the project to work on it. You need the people that were there from the start. Designers are in a different position, yet you don't need that many of them- more would simply make the decision process even slower. You don't understand game development.

Instead they have chosen to break the already small development team (Going by the picture posted in December) i

The team is four times the size in that picture. Yoshida even mentioned this in the exact same letter. Their team is huge, it could be larger but at this point it would only hurt them to add more unfamiliar programmers.

They can't fix problems one at time because everything relates to everything. There has to be a larger picture: combat (and everything it involves), class system, UI, engine, servers, content- everything has to work together flawlesly. They must be developed in a parallel because building new features off concepts alone does not work. Concepts never meet reality. In the end you have an UI, a combat system, a class system and content that are separated from each other and make no sense.

Having to wait 4 months (discounting 2 months for the new dev team to get settled in and another month for the earthquake.) for a company that's already notoriously slow for fixing things, for what may or may not be decent content at all, is long enough for most people

What you don't seem to grasp is that they aren't fixing this game with your terms. They are doing what makes it fastest for them to update the game in long-term, and that involves not splitting their workload to smaller pieces so that it can be implemented to live servers every month which would slow them down considerably. You lack the understanding needed to realize that this project is larger than anything any developer has ever made post-release, and as thus takes longer to develop.

[Peregrine]

You lack the understanding needed to realize that this project is larger than anything any developer has ever made post-release, and as thus takes longer to develop.

Hahaha oh lordy I see a few in the crowd still fall for it.

[Rentahamster]

You don't understand game development.

And you do?

[Betelgeuzah]

And you do?

Enough in this context.