Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-passionate about making games. I'm not saying you shouldn't love your job. I'm saying there's too strong a bias towards love of games in favour of actual ability in hiring. Outsiders "wouldn't understand the business", after all.
Personally, I've always cared more about the tech than anything else. I didn't go into the industry because I wanted to design games, I just love the technical challenges. I do also very much enjoy playing games, but the activities are completely separate for me, the fact that they both involve games is more coincidental than anything else. I guess I managed to get past the interview stage due to that coincidence or because I knew what to say. For better or worse, it probably afforded me a different perspective than many other people "on the inside".
In any case, I soon noticed there were few people like me in the industry. It's no coincidence the creative director is the one everyone looks up to. They all want his job. They don't really want to be managing hordes of programmers, artists, level designers and testers. They don't want to be hacking away at the guts of the AI. Working on iterating continuously on just 1 or 2 levels for the duration of 2-3 years, again and again, is just one step along the way. After all, they could still be stuck in QA like their friends, playing the same game every day for 2-3 years. But soon, they'll be designing their own games!
If you think hiring great programmers is hard and unquantifiable, try hiring game designers. By the time you can tell if they're any good they'll have scaled the ranks and be the object of worship somewhere and who's going to give that up or given up and left the industry. So the main selection criterion is persistence despite terrible working conditions. It's not a big step to plain delusion. So either they really really love what they're doing, or they're not skilled/talented enough to do similar work in an industry that pays more and treats them better.
Now, to get back to the point: who are these people managing development teams and large studios? They seem to be people who stuck around for long enough but weren't awesome enough at whatever they were doing to become creative director, technical director, whatever. They're not doing this because they love managing people. They're doing this because they want to be creative director, or because they're stuck. Worst of all, they don't seem to want to run a business. I know people always complain that big business gets in the way of making great games. I call bullshit. Not living in the real (business) world gets in the way of making great games.
There are exceptions, of course, as always. As far as I can tell, few companies encourage that kind of culture, though.
(FWIW, I still do game programming, but only as a contractor, for small companies, and only about 50% of the time in order to preserve my sanity)
