I think the reason is pretty obvious - they realized they way more stuff that needed doing to have any chance of getting it completed in time and went into feature triage mode. My guess is that the quests we ended up with were the ones that required the least amount of work to get into a state where you could reasonably ship. Narrowing the preconditions for something also makes it a lot easier to test.
If that was the original intent it would certainly explain why the dialog is the way it is, though.