@mistoes I'll just chime in on this lovely debate and say one thing about software development: throwing more people at the problem doesn't accelerate development in proportion to the number of people added.
As in, there are diminishing returns to simply putting more people on a given project. There comes a point where you have too many hands working on code, models, and so on. Then you encounter delays trying to consolidate all that work in such a way that doesn't cause your code base to implode due to conflicts.
I guess there is few more points I would like to add.
Splitting the teams up prevents developer burn out. You don't have the entire work force developing on really short intervals. Combined with hairy code from lots of people modifying it, you risk much more buggy releases. There would simply not be enough time to test the code before release. If you thought that patches have been buggy now, it would be far worse when you combine tight deadlines, too many people on the project, and a rabid fanbase making demands and constantly criticizing everything said and done. Rare's methodology fixes two of the three problems in a simple and elegant way.
Finally, I promise this is the last one, you have implementation time. Sure models can be developed quite quickly and scripted and whatever. Coding it to simply work is what some call 'spaghetti code'. It is called such because it is messy and hard to clean up later. It is quick and dirty which doesn't bode well for future code maintenance.
Since Meg has use later in the game, you also have to consider future functionality for it and code for it appropriately. You also have to code it in such a way that it can be modified relatively easy in the future in case you want to have behavioral changes in some future update. Then there is the every present testing and making sure there are no memory leaks, the model renders properly, behaves appropriately, and not crash the server. The more moving parts you have in anything, the more difficult it is to modify that anything in a way that it still works as intended. And so lots of planning, which takes time, has to take place to make sure everything plays nicely and not crash the game leaving everyone in frothing fury.
Long story short, just because something seems easy to implement and can be implemented quickly doesn't account for integration into the much larger and more complex system.
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