Red Dead Redemption 2 is fun but feels like an exercise in tedium and frustration

[BigGuyCIA]

flaws are brought out they're handwaved away since so much work went into the game.

This is a bigger problem with Rockstar now more than ever. I was listening to the Giant Bomb podcast (it was from 2016) and they briefly went into the Leslie Benzies lawsuit where he was suing TakeTwo for unwarranted termination or w.e. Anyways, Leslie was literally brought in for RDR2 because the game was a total mess and had been stuck in development hell since 2014 (Leslie was known for being able to turn projects around and get them back on track).

When you couple that with Rockstar's average work week (100 hours) you begin to wonder why this is an acceptable level of crunch when so much of it could have been ironed out day one. I get they put a lot of hard work into their games, but the red dead subreddit had a plethora of people praising their hardwork, and I couldn't help but feel so much of it could have been alleviated if the game wasn't a fucking mess at inception.