There's tons of nuance in these discussions that gets missed on the consumer side.
I studied animation, focusing on games for a while, for about 5 years and have friends that have worked on pretty much any title you can name. Inside the studios those people work insanely hard in very volatile environments where a change in direction and/or management can wipe out months of work in an afternoon. It's also an incredibly rough job market right now, I know tons of people who have worked on huge titles that having a hard time finding work.
If you've noticed more delays, expense, and longer development cycles in the past several years, it's not a coincidence that those things have been happening at the same time Microsoft took ownership of many of the studios that used to create these games independently. The same thing has happened with the giant conglomerate studios like EA, as well as Sony to an extent (though some of their previously independent studios seem to have been more successful managing their timelines and releases).The things we all complain about can almost always be traced back to indecision at the higher levels.
In short, the massive amounts of money to made in gaming have made it more beancounting than creative, just like most entertainment these days. And that makes it worse for everybody except the people making the decisions (who are generally insulated from the repercussions of their decisions).
