Its like western game developers have a "go big, or go home" mentality (and either win big, or crash and burn).

Etrian Odyssey games are good & enjoyable, and Im glad someone is makeing them dispite them not selling millions and millions of units each.

Id say the Japanese are more efficient at programming. Just look at the horror story Bethesda and their bloated code.

I think the developers themselves are not to blame at all. The companies they work for however...

the west probably has more examples but square, Konami and Capcom show that it's more of a big publisher in problem as opposed to a regional thing.

Not sure about money, but I think they might have an issue with game sizes

Exactly.  What they don't understand is that they can allocate large dev costs to big projects and small dev costs to small projects, however, Western devs don't seem to understand that this is good economics.  I've always wondered why Western devs never make games for handhelds.