Since the development history of The Dig is undeniably a fun topic, I’d like to challenge a few assumptions you make in your original post, ATM. Let me start with this:
People who hold an uncharitable view of the released game would tell you that’s just what happened. You suggest that it’s somehow suspicious or untoward that the company didn’t just rush the game out the door within months of Moriarty’s departure, but that strikes me as a drastic underestimation of the problems the project was facing. When he spoke to us for our retrospective on The Dig, Bill Eaken said bluntly of Moriarty’s version: “The programming was a complete disaster.”
To tell you what you already know, Moriarty ambitiously insisted on introducing a brand-new engine for his version of The Dig, rather than tried-and-true SCUMM. The idea was that the team wanted to raise the bar on animation with The Dig, and the SCUMM engine as it existed at that time simply wasn’t up to the task. Moriarty’s solution was to devise a new animation system, possibly called Landrou, which was then built into a game engine, possibly called StoryDroid. (I say possibly because there’s always been some confusion/debate about the names of the new systems.)
This bold decision was met with huge resistance from the team that maintained SCUMM (chief among them Aric Wilmunder, I have to assume), who felt it was foolhardy to develop a new engine from the ground-up when SCUMM was mature, demonstrated and stable, and what’s more could have been enhanced to meet the robust animation demands if the money and time being spent to establish unproven tech had been invested in SCUMM instead. Somehow, Moriarty got his way (with Eaken speculating that management just kind of shrugged and saw the debate as a rivalry between the art team, who were naturally dazzled by the opportunities of Landrou, and the programmers), but what happened in the end would seem to vindicate the dissenting view.
I’m sure there was more to the project’s troubles than that, of course. More than one person has made note of the huge amount of pressure Moriarty was under, and it’s been noted that he was used to working with a tiny team, and perhaps became overwhelmed with scale of The Dig. Still, the decision to replace SCUMM seemed to be the fateful one that spelled disaster for the project. The programming side of things just never came together, and at a certain point it became undeniable even to the managers that for the longest time had been (again, per Eaken) dismissing warnings people had been delivering about the project as developer politics. Finally, they stepped in and put an end to it.
So if anything, the fact that LucasArts went from that situation to shipping The Dig by the end of 1995 is a testament to the remarkable expedience of the team involved. You noted that Dave Grossman was briefly on the project between Moriarty and Clark; describing himself as a “hedge trimmer” who began the condensing of the design that Clark carried on with, he portrayed the project that Moriarty left as being in a “larval” stage. How are you going to ship a game that is in a “larval” stage in 1993, by the end of 1993? When you account for the fact that LEC didn’t find the replacement project leader right away, and that when they did he insisted (predictably) that he wanted to revert back to SCUMM, I would say it was a herculean task that they managed to release what they did, as quickly as they did. And this stubborn campaign to bring The Dig to a successful finish in spite of everything ("Three words -Spielberg, Spielberg, and Spielberg" is how Bill Tiller describes the motivation on the studio's part) might well have come at the cost of other, arguably more meritorious projects, like Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix.