My opinion/speculation/conclusion:
Looks to me like, ultimately, the fault was in the E3 2013 trailer, where at that point the game's development was rebooted, not merely continued. They carried over the story, a lot of assets, and the general direction, but absolutely none of it was finalized. Everything that changed since then (director, characters, names, designs, etc.) are all things that happen when a game is in active development. The problem was that the 2013 trailer and their own talk gave the impression that the game was well underway in terms of development, when in reality it was just re-starting. Since then development has progressed steadily and has been shown relatively frequently. Hell, they even got a playable demo out the door.
The issue with this year is that they skipped E3 because they didn't want to devote time and resources into another grandiose showing, and instead just deferred people to Gamescom for an "update", with the biggest problem being that "update" being hyped as a huge media blowout ("center stage!" etc.). Like I said a few pages back, the blunder at Gamescom and the decision of skipping E3 doesn't really mean the actual development itself is troubled, it was just shitty PR.
That's why there's a lot of "maybe"s regarding story, designs, etc., because the game is active in development. If we have to put it into percentages, I (and I think many others) were under the impression that game development of Versus XIII became a priority a couple of years prior to the 2013 trailer and at that point was ~65-75% done, and I thought it'd be out by two years (e.g., December 2015) at the latest. In my opinion I think the reality is that the game's development was rebooted a few months before E3 2013 and at the time of the trailer that development was maybe ~10-25% done, and now we're getting up to ~65-75%. Which definitely doesn't sound too crazy, but the problem is the prolonged pre-production prior to 2013 and the fact that Squeenix never bothered telling us just how early the game actually was at E3 2013. They definitely wanted to avoid having to tell people to wait several more years but...well...that's exactly what they're doing now so I don't know why they thought just kicking that can down the road would've helped them.