If you could ask 1 question to the Devs

[Payotz]

...they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

[SpiralMask]

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

bringing in a fresh person could take months/years to train (training in whatever engine specific stuff is going on, integration into their teams, learning their way around the codebase since basically every person has their own 'dialect' when coding) and each new person added actually decreases the efficiency of this process further (there have been a great many GDC talks over the years explaining the woes and statistics of exactly this), which is a huge investment that people would complain about not getting content ASAP after the announced new hires, since even experienced devs cant just drop in and get straight to work.

this isnt necessarily aimed at you, just that folks saying "just throw more money/people at it" are pretty greatly underestimating the challenges and time involved--and just injecting more money wont work either, since there's only so many man-hours the staff can give, and the company is adamant about not becoming a crunch-heavy or "black" company.

[Jandroid]

bringing in a fresh person could take months/years to train (training in whatever engine specific stuff is going on, integration into their teams, learning their way around the codebase since basically every person has their own 'dialect' when coding) and each new person added actually decreases the efficiency of this process further (there have been a great many GDC talks over the years explaining the woes and statistics of exactly this), which is a huge investment that people would complain about not getting content ASAP after the announced new hires, since even experienced devs cant just drop in and get straight to work.

this isnt necessarily aimed at you, just that folks saying "just throw more money/people at it" are pretty greatly underestimating the challenges and time involved--and just injecting more money wont work either, since there's only so many man-hours the staff can give, and the company is adamant about not becoming a crunch-heavy or "black" company.

This is also true. I also remember reading about how Yoshi-P really likes how efficient his team is currently set up (the same reason he brings in guest creators to break the efficient mold they've established). I've also studied programming and have even attended a GDC event in-person myself (with a student discount of course, tickets are hella expensive even with a discount) so I can understand where you're going with this.

But at the same time, it's inevitable for them to have to hire new staff as well. Developers are human beings too, some developers may want to move on from the game while some may need more rest and a reduction in workload. When these happen then we would be left with less manpower and no replacement.

Another thing to consider as well is to spend resources in hiring third party support. I don't know if the FFXIV team outsources any programming work (which sounds like a nightmare in my opinion) but I know that they do outsource art assets from third party companies and companies from even outside of Japan. Consider the state that the Viera & Hrothgar are in; since you also studied game development (I assume so since you watched GDC seminars), then you'd know that the adding a new race is an exponential (non-linear) increase in workload since they'd have to create even more assets for every new armor they make in addition to recreating past assets to work with the new races. While they'd have to tighten their quality control if they decide to outsource more art assets, doing so is a lot less demanding than recreating assets themselves.

The addition of Viera and Hrothgar is just one of those cases where I think Yoshi-P's team bit off more than they can chew, and now there are fans chewing them out for it because these new races can't wear all helmets. This is how a team expansion and increase in resources can really benefit the game in the long run and why I think this type of investment is worth the risk.

[Jojoya]

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

It's more than just an issue of training.

Ask Blizzard what happened when they doubled the WoW development team 6 months into Mists of Pandaria with the intention of releasing more content faster in the following expansion and all future expansion.

Better yet, ask anyone who was playing WoW at the time. We got what's generally considered to be WoW's worst expansion ever with very little content at the start and not all that much content added during the patches.

Part of it was training the industry veterans they had hired on Blizzard's systems and methods. Part of it was helping them fit in with their new teams.

But Blizzard also discovered that having a lot more pieces of content to add to the game created big bottlenecks post-creation when the time came to make certain that content integrated successfully into the rest of the game and alongside all those other new parts. What time savings they had gained in initial creation was offset by the additional time needed to test and fix it when there were inevitable conflicts causing things to break.

As a result, WoW didn't up getting more new content than ever before. Warlords of Draenor was very disappointing with the dismal content they added. Even Legion, which felt like it had more content than an expansion had gotten in years, was largely reliant on content created for other reasons being given a new look for end game. Leveling dungeons became Mythic+ dungeons at level cap. Zone story quests became world quests at level cap.

For all that it sounds reasonable that more money should mean more new content, it's not the way it works out in the long run.