The One That Took Too Long And Still Got Away: MGS4 and why it's the one game I wish had a bigger development time

(Apologies in advance. Once again, I always end up with huge paragraphs. I'll cover most of them in spoiler tags, and just leave the ending and beginning uncovered if you wanna skip my deep dive into my game of choice. I also had to completely rephrase my title as it was too long, so most of its premise is gonna start in the next paragraph.)

Ever heard about how nowadays games and their dev cycles/sequels take too long, while older games usually took just a couple of years to release? What's an old game that you wish actually had [more] dev time and came out more content or feature-complete? What would be the consequences of that?

For starters my example is not \that\ great as far as old games go cause it actually took 4 years. For 2000s standards, it was not good but also not terrible compared to nowadays where 5 years is the average. My wish was for the delay of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which came out in June 2008 and took 4 years to make. 3 and a half years, to be more precise, or about almost 3 years and 5 months after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater came out in June 2004. Sure, between those two games there came out MGS3's upgraded Subsistence version which came with the much needed QoL improvement of a free 3D camera which became the basis for every subsequent MGS3 re-release, and also Metal Gear Acid 1, 2 and MGS: Portable Ops for the PSP. But at the time, none of them were really that mainline or notable, even tho you could argue Portable Ops was canon and an intended main chapter back then, and people still argue about its canon status to this day. But as far as important releases go, the main team and Kojima were focused mostly on MGS4 after 3 initially dropped.

And boy, what a fucking game MGS4 was. [spoiler]Only those who've played it on the PS3 will know how wild that journey was. And how bitter a taste it left, if you loved all the extra content in the Integral or VR Missions versions of MGS1, or the Substance version of MGS2, even the Subsistence version of MGS3, whose significant bonus gameplay content was just its long-dead online mode, still offered great value even single player cause the new camera encouraged even more runs of the already great story campaign, which at the time, at around 10 to 15 hours with cutscenes, was pretty long. It had its ton of mandatory and optional cutscenes and radio calls, sure, but the balance with gameplay ratio was still fantastic, you could argue it's still the best in the series to this day, as you can spend a good chunk in-between heavy story sessions, just lying low and causing mayhem in the remote Soviet wilderness. Tho of course it got surpassed by MGSV, but in the classic MGS story formula of short but long enough campaigns, MGS3 was the winner.!!But then you get to MGS4, and you know. It's just so cutscene + radio/codec dense. 9 hours of it alone, while the actual gameplay campaign barely amounts to half of it. To make matters worse, a lot of the game's ambitions and promises were watered down, like the dynamic battlefield where you could join either side and manipulate the war to your advantage. It's mostly a very linear and narrow corridor full of scripted sequences were the villain-alligned private military soldiers just keep mowing down the underdog local militia NPCs, and a lot of the times you can't influence or change the tide of it at all, specially not without going Rambo or guns blazing. Then there are sections, like just before you reach the building with Meryl, when the enemy soldiers spawning into the map are just endless and you can't just clear the level before moving in, you're supposed to just blast or crawl your way past them. The game's stealth itself is very prohibitive, even compared to MGS3, it's older brother from which movements and mechanics it borrows and expands many of its ideas from. There's barely ANY great ways to hide around the warfare maps without being spotted, unless you're constantly crawling around and making use of the octocamo suit that blends into any texture when you're lying down. The game's constantly throwing at you new weapons, bonus items and opportunities all of which almost never work in the stealth context you're trying to enjoy. Like it wants you to go Rambo and guns blazing all the time. Hell, we have a massive in-game store for buying, customizing and/or unlocking enemy weapons. A wide variety, from all the points we accumulate during gameplay, 90% of them barely help in a stealth-focused run. And it is such a miserable and short affair if you just go against the game's ludonarrative and just blast your entire way through in alert mode. It's not fun, and it'll even punish you for it with in-game stress levels and PTSD mechanics. Like those are too many mixed signals, Kojima. What were you intending here?!!Anyway, those are only the first two of five gameplay Acts, surely the other 3 will have good classic MGS stealth, right? Well... Not quite. Act 3 is just a half hour trailing mission that can become two hours if you mess it up. No optional side-missions to do in that great open map that's a recreation of part of real life Prague. Just mess around some semi-empty streets that are under military curfew and have some soldiers in every other corner. After that, it's just a ton of cutscenes, a bike chase on-rails shootout, a boss, and then another ton of cutscenes. Act 4 is a glorious return to Shadow Moses, MGS1's island that's been abandoned for over a decade. But it is also quite short and if you take your time there it's only because you're going down memory lane. It could have been a great return to classic MGS stealth and more complex intertwining levels full of soldiers that actually make your life hell, but it's just a narrow corridor full of stupid robots you can fight or sneak past. The only soldiers there, are the stupid FROGS. A type of superhuman combat unit. Getting in the way of your actually interesting sniper boss-fight. And th