Add BF4 on the PC

That's part of the reason why I love Nintendo. They give their developers the time they need to get it done right. Even if this results in "please understand" delays, I do prefer by far a finished, polished game coming a bit later than a crapton of day-one patches just to get it barely running.

You forgot The Crew. It made Unity look like a Nintendo game.

Not that we expected the culprit to be someone else...
The solution would be more power to developers: instead of become property of publishers, they should remain the masters of themselves and hire publishers as sales and marketing service providers. Obviously this can only work with devs able to economically manage themselves in a viable way, more flexibility shouldn't mean doing like Duke Nukem Whenever team(s), and once granted the dev a deadline, they should respect it or be fined, as the marketing machine costs a lot. The advantage for devs should be freedom and being able to decide a more reasonable launch date to offer a better product since launch, but in return they should offer the publisher the highest reliability and seriousness, without becoming whimsical stars, or megalomaniacs that given more freedom and the ability to choose the launch period, frantically add more features up to being not able to respect the deals with the publishers anyway.
Current situation is publishers' fault, but it's also a consequence of previous devs unreliabilty that forced too many of them to become publishers' slaves to avoid bankrupcy (or even to recover after it).
This said, in many cases devs made great games that received from gamers the appreciation they deserved too late to save them, but these unlucky cases are a minority, and bad management contributed to most of these devs demise anyway.

It's almost always the publishers fault. If given the proper time all developers can release a stable, playable game.

The main reason this happens is the importance of hitting specific launch deadlines. In the case of blockbusters like CoD, Battlefield, and Assassin's Creed, they're going to release during the holiday period no matter what state the game is in. A delay into December would literally cost them millions; a delay into the year after would likely cost much, much more. It's a jumbled mess but it's clear why they do it. The holiday launch window is just that important for yearly franchises.

However, I think we should be a bit cautious about including games that suffer from online problems only in this. I think part of the problem there is that online technology is still sorting itself out and many of the problems don't manifest themselves until you have millions of people hitting the system at once. I'm hoping situations like Drive Club and MCC are more inline with new system teething pains and that developers learn from those problems. I don't believe either publisher believed things would be so bad when those games were released into the wild, which I can't say about some of the titles from EA, Activison, and Ubisoft.

Yearly franchises with absolute-must-hit deadlines are the real problem.

Do you think publishers have methods to quantify the damage done to a franchise/brand by releasing a botched game? If the current iteration fails to meet standards, future games in the series could be affected with negative growth. That, in the long-term could cost them even more.

Yep. Hopefully it turns around, but these games are still selling millions of copies even while being broken.

That's true but it's also a lot harder to prove to investors in an earnings call.  They'll want to know why a game threw away millions by releasing in January instead of November or why the budget ballooned with an additional two months of development costs but they might not be satisfied with, "it wasn't ready yet."  Especially when games like Black Ops can release full of bugs and still earn billions the next year.  Gamers, in general, have proven themselves lacking in long term memory.

Businessmen control the gaming world.  They care about a concrete bottom-line more than the quality of the product.  It's short-term thinking but then investors don't really care that much about building a slow-and-steady franchise that lasts decades.  They want to hit as hard as they can while an IP is hot and make as much money as fast as possible.