Key staff members leave Square Enix, including Final Fantasy Versus XIII’s system menu director

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Wagram said:

Development time wise, yes a lot of the problems in that aspect were because they decided to skip a generation when the game was already running on the PS2. They wasted so many years building an engine that is already being replaced.

While I can agree that SE was incredibly inefficient with that game, amongst others, I should think that having so many more years to develop it than prior games in the series would largely negate the bad effects of the platform switchover. Essentially, the big issues I've heard about the game (note: I have not played it myself, and thus claim no personal opinion on the matter)  were things like the linearity and the combat system.

While lack of development time might explain these, it seems to me that the additional years of planning should have done more to help them refine the combat system at the least, and to plan around the problems of linearity. Basically, even if the engine wasn't ready for three years (which is what I understand), they could have used that time to lay the foundation for the game, and thus hit the ground running once the engine was prepared. In essence, the only FF game with more time between it and its predecessor was XII (I'm not counting XI, or XIV for that matter), and that was because its director had a breakdown.