As somebody who's worked in game dev, I can relate to the author.
You could totally argue that the incompatibility and non-modularity of the land + naval AI systems is bad design, but that does not put the blame on the author: they may not have had anything to do with it!
In my opinion, it is very much leadership who is at fault in this example. When the programming team says "this can't be done in time for release", and then leadership says "that's rough buddy, do it anyways", that's 100% leadership's fault.
I wouldn’t even blame the authors of the system that existed. Even in a perfect culture, compromises need to be made. If the time needed to adapt land warfare AI to the new sea warfare AI in Empire(?) is high, better to just focus on making the thing you’re building work well than to be “pure.”
Now consider a culture that wasn’t, as reported, particularly healthy and…