Most people already know all of that. There's an excellent interview with Kenji Imafune that goes over a lot of that. I'll try to dig it up if it can.
Does it really matter, though? Should the public, who pays these companies, simply give bad games a free pass because the suits above the devs have no idea how to sit on their fingers and wait for a game to be finished?
This isn't some situation where once you know the facts behind why things are the way they are, things are just magically better. This has been the standard for well over a decade now, and the only difference between now and then is the fact that the cracks are starting to show with increasing alarm, due to the fact that it simply takes so much time to make a decent game now.
I don't care if its the Devs fault, or the shareholder's faults, or the President of the company's fault as a consumer. All I want is a good product, and its the entire company's job to provide that product. If they don't, then they have failed, and it doesn't matter whose fault it is.
Like the complaints would suddenly stop if you gave every customer who bought this game a manual stating that "its not the devs fault! Blame the Shareholders and the ignorant President!" That doesn't even begin to stop the bleeding; clear, consistent, and rapid changes, however, do.
We'll see if these upcoming changes can right the ship's course.
Edit: Also, Hyan, if you want to look at it that way, then modifying phalanx to insta-block an attack constitutes a "design change". I'd certainly hope you understand what I mean by a design change.
Allowing for more freedom of moment with the PCs - that's a design change.
Overhauling the combat system - that's a design change.
Reworking mob AI to not be so... erratic - that's a design change.
Some of what they listed -are- design changes, yes. If they do anything to remove the abhorrent UI lag, I'd constitute any and all of that as a major design change, and quite possibly a philosophy change, considering that they were/are so adamant about keeping this send/receive ping-pong game between our PCs and their servers for every button click we press.