Really seems like a technical mess all around. I'm not sure why they would push for such high crowds and AI assuming that's what's causing the issues. Just turn it down. Solid performance comes before everything else
Not really. Creative vision comes before anything else in a lot of entertainment endeavors.
It's the same post I made awhile back about Ice Climbers not making Wii U version of Smash because Sakurai's design document/vision for the game called for character parity.
The tech side of developments builds as closely to vision of the designers as possible.
That vision doesn't always get compromised... it's the engineers jobs to make it work, and the producers jobs to make it work on time.
Clearly this is a case where the creative team sold an idea to management that was ubiersally accepted interally as the right vision for the game. And bringing the brutality and crowded, teeming masses of the French Revolution was part of it. The producers probably sold it up as attainable and on budget. The engineers busted their ass off to make it happen, but either the hardware itself failed them (i.e. even as Vincent says, they were originally planning for stronger processes or whatever for their AI) or they didn't have enough time to optimize (the game was delayed 2 weeks if you recall, perhaps that wasn't enough).
But anyway, seems like a case where creative vision comes first, and that's not entirely abnormal. After all, that's what most people buy into.