Yes, I'm not talking about making people buy the game again or start over in any way. The Dev teams would simply take the servers offline and do what they need to do - once the game is actually up to par it would then be brought back online to the public.

At that point, assuming everything went well, they could work on one more big patch or expansion and advertise that alongside the console release(s).

I think this would be the easiest way to fix this problem in it's entirety. Simply lull the plug and work, then show us something when changes have actually been implemented on a large scale.