Sarafan: The problem is that the delays don't help to avoid crunches. If fact they can extend crunches to another few months. It's even hard to think how long it would take to release a complete AAA game if the management would want to avoid crunches completely.
If on top of 6 month extensions they still 'require' slave labour all throughout to finish, that's basically an admission that they simply aren't being honest with themselves over required time-frames for their large complex games, and either need to budget in what it takes to fulfil their vision or dial back their ambition a little to match their budget, instead of over-extending and simultaneously trying to force a deadline based on completely arbitrary metrics before being forced to boot out unfinished product (something that's ruined many potentially great games in the past).
Back in the 90's games like Thief were made on budgets of around $7m and literally a dozen people. Today's larger and more complex open-world games can have literally 10-30x the budget and personnel involved and it's insane of them to pretend nothing has changed in terms of how that impacts time-frames. Stockholders of major studios who want all the juicy profits that comes from selling $250m revenue earning "Masterpiece" titles simply have to accept that "Masterpieces" become as such because they are highly polished which requires "more time in the oven".
Same with gamers themselves often having unrealistic 'demands'. Dragon Age Origins was widely praised for its great gameplay (programmable tactics menu's, high degree of polish, PC version was really well optimised for keyboard & mouse + proper monitor-optimised UI instead of being a cheap & nasty console port, etc). That took time to make (5 years). At the same time, upon release there were a few people sulking because "the graphics in this 2009 game looked like mid-2000's". Well yes they did precisely because DAO's development started in 2004 in order to make such a large & deep game that wasn't a consolized rush-job. If they wanted better graphics, it would have taken another year at which point the same people would have complained about another year's delay (as a result of giving them exactly what they were demanding). People who want absolutely everything in a game (Crysis graphics, 'ultra-deep branching RPG plot', etc), and all made in the space of 2-3 years simply need to be more realistic about their demands.
Edit: Look at Oblivion.
Development began in 2002 and was originally planned for Winter 2005. Wildly out of touch Bethesda shareholders stamped their little feet like children over a few months delay and yet it was still a hugely buggy mess upon release in March 2006. Now add on the literally hundreds of hours of patching up by community modders (eg, unofficial bug fixes, Darnified UI, etc), and a "real full completion" release date would have probably taken a good extra 1-2 years into 2007-2008 of equivalent proper full-time game development. This is one example of many of how people who finance a project set the deadlines whilst being almost completely out of touch with the work involved on making the project (and God knows what state the game would have been in had it been released a year earlier...)
