Interested to know who's idea it was to release the game when it was released. Surely it wasn't Tanaka's. SE is a shareholder owned company, and perhaps they needed to pad earnings in the quarter and this seemed like the answer.

I don't really know.

The only thing I can say is that Tanaka worked on FFXI, which despite its many flaws, ranks as one of the best MMO's of all time for me. I think Tanaka is back working on FFXI again, although I may be confused.

With that said it would have been interesting to see his vision of the game fully realized versus the new guy's vision. Although I absolutely loathed this game at release, it may have turned into something fun like FFXI did. Now it seems to be turning into an entirely different game, while trying to retain bits and pieces of the original vision.

It would have been brave to just realize the original vision and let it succeed or fail on those merits rather than cave to vocal minority of back seat couch potato would be game devs.