> They should just be iterating on top of the previous game.
You can’t boot your whole game every time to do AI iteration. Whether or not the menu loads is completely irrelevant to your work. You don’t really want to integrate your broken shit with the currently working rest of the game either.
At least, that’s how I’d think about it.
You can always run the AI in a separate test harness to see changes more quickly. This is what they were doing throughout development. What they weren’t doing was putting everything back together to see if the game still worked or made any sense (until the very end).
If you don’t want to check in broken AI code then don’t; that’s what branches are for. But the fact that they weren’t maintaining a working master is inexcusable.