Building the engine alone takes 30 minutes after each change. You're not going to get anything done in 30 minutes. And the more you work on this, the less you're working on shippable features that make money.
In the mobile space, an app opening faster is so valuable you can make a career out of just that. I haven't worked desktop/console games, but having load times be 6 minutes longer than it needs to be, when you're trying to make money on ongoing microtransactions, has got to be losing you so much more money than the time spent fixing.
That's a fine argument, and I'm sure that if management knew they could get a 70% decrease in load times in exchange for focusing on this one area, they would have done so. But nobody knew. And discovering that would have been expensive.
I'll meet you halfway though: they should have had profiling sessions that pointed to the JSON parsing code as the issue. I imagine that all of their profiling efforts were focused on the runtime performance, not the load time. Simply put, no one did that profiling, and I don't fault them for focusing on runtime performance (which is where the real money is, as Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrated by not having it, and subsequently having their PS4 orders yanked and refunded).
No, Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 after CD Project promised refunds and then forced Sony to do it on their end. Sony didnt like that.
Once again - Control by Remedy ran on base PS4 at 10 frames per second, TEN frames. Critically acclaimed, reviewers loved it and didnt tend to mention TEN frames per second on base consoles, not pulled from the store.
This feature would bring in millions of dollars on its own. When your customer base is earning you $1 billion per year a 1% improvement is $10 million per year. You could hire an entire team of 100 engineers for that salary just to fix this single bug.
