A) This conversation is irrelevant. This is the real world, and a company has given a team a due-date for product implementation. If that due date were not met, huge amounts of money would be lost and people would be fired. As much as we may academically debate how much time this project requires, and as much as we may or may not feel more time would create a better 4E, in corporate terms, if the project is late, it is a failure and that is that.
B) 6 months for six monsters is what people do if they have day jobs, which I am guessing you and most game designers out there in the world do. WotC has full-time employees who show up for work every day to make monsters or whatever else. And these are people who see game design as a dream job, not shlubs who show up to collect a check. These folks take work home with them and probably don't think about much else. Add up all the time you spend on work-related matters each week AND all the time you spend thinking about gaming each week. That total is how much time this staff spends working on 4E each week. They can do the Monster Manual on time.
C) As mentioned above, 3.5 sales will continue to decrease over the next six months. The PHB is the #1 selling RPG book year in and year out, but I would expect 2008 to be worst year of PHB sales ever... until the 4E version comes out. Six more months of decrease is a corporate nightmare and a fiscal disaster. Not only would people get fired, but paychecks probably would not be written. A delay like the one you're talking about not only won't happen, but should not happen given its consequences for the RPG industry.
D) If you don't believe even a bad new edition of D&D will sell extremely well, you are vastly overestimating the discernment of the average, non-message-board-posting D&D gamer. This is a hypothetical, but if you take the five best, most well-considered and carefully written role-playing game rulesets of any given year, add their sales together, and compare them (even phenomenal games like Dogs in the Vineyard or Burning Wheel or Mutants & Masterminds) to that year or any year's sales of the PHB, I think you'll find the PHB still outsells them all-- even including the year WoD 2.0 came out. I think poor design would hurt long-term sales, but not short-term, and short-term money is clearly the point of releasing a new edition so soon. If the product is not bad, but at least mediocre to decent, they should do fine. If it is good or great, it could revive the post-d20-boom RPG industry. I hope for the best, of course.
E) All that said, there does seem to be a lot of rushing going on. It is my hope that the areas of WotC's implementation that see the drawbacks of that are those where the rushing seems most apparent, like the Digital Initiative and tied-in game settings, and not the game itself. It is my hope that the basic rules of 4E are treated as the centerpiece of the entire operation and therefore given the most care and attention. I do not know if my hopes are realistic, but if someone smart is at the wheel they should see that errors in the Core Rules will poison the peripheral sources of profit.
None of this is to defend WotC or 4E, but such a delay would not happen, and if it did many people-- such as employees and their dependents-- would actually suffer. Good or bad, 4E has to roll for the summer cons. The WotC folks just have to do the best they can in the time they have.
