Spot on Liam.
MOO3 was a disaster but actually more time would not have helped. They fundamentally ignored all the good UI and design decisions that made the MOO series a classic. In fact, they destroyed the MOO franchise.
Atari did do a project review about a year before release in which they should have killed the project. The game was in deep trouble at the time, overly complex and consumed with trivia that slowed the game terribly. Atari made their second mistake in not only going forward but keeping mostly the same team that got them into the mess in the first place. The team fundamentally didn't understand abstraction for playability's sake. They didn't at all see it as a problem that there was next to no visual feedback of progress until beta testing hit. By then the financial pressure was such that it was really too late to go back to the drawing board again. They had to push it out.
Unlike MOO3, SC2 is a good enhancement of an existing design. Extra time does help here. Hubert understands the balance between abrstraction and playability quite well. And unlike the MOO3 team, he actually did the prior incarnation and so understands the meaning of his franchise better than anyone.
I actually think this is going to be a classic in the genre, tough to beat for a long time.