Yeah but thats the point, the project scope gets locked quite early on and ideas are either dumped or repurposed for addons or sequels, the same goes for the development phase, when things are mostly finished but lacking in polish or are only half done, the work can be dumped or recycled external to the project itself because keeping staff on the job beyond the allotted time is extremely dangerous to the project.
Once the staff are finished or have slack time before the commencement of a new task, they might be allowed to chip away at the unfinished content in the hopes it might be useful. If it is, it's good business to sell it or give it as an incentive for new game purchases.

It feels better and better to have stopped buying new games due to the DRM used. So many obvious bonuses.

They won that at the beginning of the year with the announcement of their new DRM.

Ubisoft games are dropping in price like lead to the bottom of the sea. No way they'll make more profits the way things are going - at least not on PC - and ironically, this year is set to release a whole range of big-name games. Settlers 7 looks fine, so does AC2, the new Splinter Cell, etc. yet I'm not touching any of them.

They stated they'll focus more on consoles next year:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/18/ubisoft-remains-refocused-on-xbox-360-ps3-in-new-fiscal-year/

Wait, they're not blaming it on piracy?
/troll

Nah the worldwide economic crisis was caused by piracy!

Yeah, blaming it on piracy this time would be yelling fire too many times.
In other news, I cracked and bought AC2 for 'bout 10€ as it was a very good deal, but now I feel soiled. Gun or rope?

With the exception of Assassin's Creed 2 I think Ubisoft games have been getting worse and worse for years now... Vegas 2 was a quickie rehash, Double Agent and Conviction were both worse than Chaos Theory by a mile, GRAW 2 was a rehash, Endwar and HAWX were laughably bad, Prince of Persia '08 was a rhythm game rather than a platformer and sold poorly, the new PoP is a rehash of Sands of Time and is only 6 hours long, Farcry 2 was more annoying than fun, etc. etc. etc..
There was a time Ubisoft would have ranked as my top publisher, or near it... when Farcry, Sands of Time, Chaos Theory and Rainbox Six 3 were their recent games. Now? Nowhere near... bottom of the barrel in most cases.
That is why their sales are down. They should accept responsibility for that and reinvest in better games with longer development cycles that actually cater to the people who buy video game software in droves, not the mythical casual gamer who buys in droves.

But ... it doesn't get locked quite early. Technology moves and changes and two years of development time will see different movements or ideas being integrated into games. The basic premise may be set "in stone" so to speak but anything a DLC may add could easily be added during the game's design stage. I've read enough "making of"'s to know that what you said is just not true. Publishers can ask things to be added or dropped according to what they believe the market wants. Developers may realise some parts are too hard to do properly (remember STALKER's ambitious system?). Time constraints may even see entire chunks getting cut. So it's silly to think that it would be impossible to add some side quests along the way or to decide to keep it for DLC.

Yes thats called scope creep, when the client asks for additional materials to be added. Depending on the scale, it can cause a pretty massive change in the project and sometimes requires taking it back to square one.
It is easily the biggest cause for project failure (Duke nukem forever was a 100% perfect example of scope creep) and if the business is sensible, they'll develop those ideas as something like addons or sequel material rather than interfering with the core project and not develop those ideas at the cost of the actual project scope

Not true. You need to be logged in to use the DLC in ME:2. In fact, from what I've experienced, you need to be logged in before it gives you any other options at all. That's online authentication every damn time you want to play the game right there. I'm not sure where this 'only a disc check' comment is coming from, but given their log in requirement they could have done away with the disc check altogether.

No, you can disable automatic login (in the options) and play the game totally offline with only the Disc check. To check if the DLC is legit you only need to login and authenticate ONCE then you can just go into offline mode again.
That's what I'm doing.

I never noticed that. Thanks!