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I seem to remember reading that MI2 sold more copies in its first month than MI1 sold altogether, so I don't think management there was disappointed with the sales. I also don't think anyone was "stopping" anyone from making MI3, either, I just don't think anyone had a strong idea for what they wanted to pitch. Plus I don't think Ron would have considered staying at LEC just to work on MI3 when he obviously was yearning to have more control with his own company. Setting up his own company with Shelley Day was likely far more important to him than coming up with a fully fleshed out idea for MI3. When I got to meet Ron in London a few years ago, he told me that he started work on MI2 before it had even been greenlit by management. ("It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" is how he put it.) So going straight onto a THIRD Monkey Island game after that was probably the last thing he felt like doing, too. Finally, I think people make too much of MI2's ending. Bill Tiller (who admittedly isn't always the most reliable) says that it was always Ron's idea to end MI1 with his "child's dream" thing, but Tim and Dave managed to talk him out of it. When they got to MI2's ending they didn't know what to do, so they relented and let Ron have his mischievous ending... but then tacked on a few things so that someone could make a sequel. I really doubt that Ron had anything deeply or seriously planned for MI3. Maybe a couple of notions, but I think it's mostly a bit of mischievous myth-making, which is why he's never revealed it.

Honestly, I would just play the game with a walkthrough. Better to "cheat" and have played Zak at all than to get frustrated and miss out, as I gather many have. I personally like Zak about as much as anybody outside of Germany seems to. I like how it's something of a reaction to Maniac Mansion, which was a "single location" game in a sense, while Zak is wide open and globe-trotting -- kind of a wackier Indiana Jones. The main objection to Zak is that it's the most dated LucasArts game in terms of design philosophy. As with Maniac, you can die and get stuck, but these flaws are magnified with Zak because of its scope. Nothing is worse than realizing you've been stalemated because you simply failed to pick an item that is in a location you can no longer access. At least with Maniac, the nature of the game is such that you could get back to wherever you were relatively quickly if you had to start over. Because it's relatively unforgiving, Zak is probably the most "Sierra-like" of the LucasArts catalog. It predates the jump in art/animation that came with Last Crusade and lacks the trailblazer status of Maniac, so it's sort of a middle child in that early period of SCUMM before Loom and Monkey Island 1 finished the recipe and firmed up the policy never to deny the player a winnable state. I think you almost have to be familiar with the kinds of adventure games that were otherwise being released in 1988 to get a sense of how Zak represented progress, and how a lot of its worst aspects in hindsight were practically pro-forma in those days. The mazes in particular are unpleasant and utterly bald attempts to pad the game's duration, but they were also an uncritically accepted feature of the genre at the time. Zak's introduction of multiple valid puzzle solutions was something of a quiet breakthrough in my opinion, and the game deserves credit for its ambition. I think it's telling, however, that the most enjoyable scene for me is an extremely self-contained one: when you have Zak wreak havoc on the airplane and ruin a stewardess's day. It's a classic "being an asshole" adventure game moment that would have made Guybrush proud.

By all accounts the culture of the studio changed quite a bit as a product of the restructuring of the early 90s. Ron and Shelley Day were not the only people to leave the company around that time. Presumably they were just ready to strike out on their own and have stake in their own creations. As far as the motive behind making adventure games aimed at children, Ron told Mojo that "it gave me a way to do more games in a short amount of time and experiment with design issues." I think Ron saw which way the wind was blowing with adventure games in terms of growing budgets dooming them to become unsustainable, and the early Humongous years can be seen as sort of an antecedent to the digital revolution that would come. The internet was not an option yet, so games aimed at children, who didn't demand bleeding-edge graphics and 60 hours of gameplay, was sort of an alternative manifestation of the same idea Telltale popularized: make adventure games quickly and cheaply and thus profitably. The evolution is even more striking when you look at what the short-lived Hulabee, the successor of Humongous, was attempting. Ron was openly talking about downloadable adventures games by then, but the business fell apart before he could really prove what he set out to. But you look at the six-chapter Moop and Dreadly, and it's like Ron was predicting the future. Interestingly enough, Freelance Police (which would have entered development around this time) was itself conceived as a six-chapter adventure game, and the team had lobbied for digital distribution, which was too radical for the management at the time. (Ironically, the same management ultimately cancelled the game because of the cost of bringing an adventure game to retail.) Finally, Sam & Max: Season 1 demonstrated that this could work, but it's funny how different people were independently working toward the same conclusion in the years leading up to that.

Tim Schafer mentioned how they fought with the management at LucasArts to even get the name of the project lead on the cover of the games they made. MI2 finally had Ron Gilbert's name on the cover, but since the fight to get it there was a pain in the neck, I imagine he wasn't too thrilled to go through that process again with the LucasArts brass. Plus, Ron wanted to make adventure games for children, to get them interested in adventure games young so they'd carry that interest into adulthood, something LucasArts wasn't keen on doing (Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion being the sole game in that genre by LucasArts, quite a bit after Ron left). As he owned Humongous Entertainment, he could make the games he wanted to make and be credited for it. Plus, he had a deal with LucasArts that allowed him to fork the SPUTM engine and SCUMM language for the HE games, allowing him to continue using the tools he created at LucasArts. It was definitely a win-win situation for him.