This kind of commentary, obviously written by someone who feels his job isn't taken as seriously as it should be (by someone), illustrates a common problem in current game development: knowing the difference between a great game and one that's only average or poor. In short, you can perfectly align all of the mechanical elements in a game so that everything appears optimal on paper--and wind up with a boring game that stinks and few want to purchase.
I call this trend of putting flow-charts and mechanical descriptions and "game component" lists at the top of the game-development heap: Lack of Imagination (LoI.) People without the scope of imagination needed to oversee development of a great game, a game that enthralls, entertains, and is "immersive" (what a cliche' that word has become), a game that draws the player in from start to finish, frequently fall back into what I call "super-organization."
That is, they lose sight of the game they are developing and become unable to grasp it as a concept at some point, and so they attempt to break it down into all kinds of imaginary components to which they affix labels and which they arrange into neat and tidy categories. It becomes a real case of being so fixated on a single tree that the forest as a whole becomes invisible. The question of "How does the game play--is it enthralling and entertaining?" is replaced by "Does the game follow the flow chart I have constructed?" That unfortunately is symptomatic of too many games at present, and is exactly why many of them don't sell any better than they do.
Game development should be a long process of creation from start to finish, imo. If the person overseeing the development of a game loses sight of the original concept and buries himself instead in minutiae pertaining to flow charts and other abstract simplifications, chances are good that the game will be much less than it could have been.
Game creation strikes me as much like writing a book. It's easy to tell when an author is enjoying his trade and feeling his story as he writes it because his story flows and draws the reader in. Conversely, it's also easy to tell when the same author is bored and is writing words simply to fill up pages. When what's emphasized in computer games is form as opposed to substance it generally results in only average to poor games. Programmers should not oversee game creation, and game designers should not be in the business of programming, much like it is in the movie industry where generally the better movies do not cast the director as the star. IMO, of course...
It is well known that I cannot err--and so, if you should happen across an error in anything I have written you can be absolutely sure that *I* did not write it!...;)