So much more the TFO saga than this, was also a completely different unreleased
TFO title back around 2004-2005 which I worked on.
No idea if there was any correlation between the two, I don't recall there being any thought given to this earlier version at the time, but then again the whole project was so insanely over-ambitious we had more than enough on our plate keeping that in check.
Main thing though that makes me think there may have been some link was the fact that although we had free-reign over the design, it was technically not our IP, and the idiots (who ran of money, tanking the project) we were dealing with were fixated on keeping the name, if nothing else.