The "softness" of the image might have not been to your liking, but it was very much part of the artistic vision as well. Our artists wanted to try something different and very specific, and we had to create lots of new tech to enable those ideas. Some worked out and some not so much. This is why when we introduced the Photo Mode we added full control over all postprocessing (and much more), and your changes could be persistent. You could make the image as sharp and free of simulated camera artifacts as you pleased, then play the game that way. It again goes to show you that it had nothing to do with rendering limits or the technology pushing the platform too far - the choices were deliberate and our systems and the PS4 were perfectly capable to deliver as designed.
Same goes for the black bars - the aspect ratio of an image has profound implications on the way scenes are populated, framed, lit and animated - the visuals of the game were conceived and concepted from the ground up around these notions, the effect of the black bars was negligible as far as performance goes. As I said many times, our PC prototype from 2011 and all the concept art from this period (years before the PS4 specs were finalized) have the same aspect ratio and the black bars. Again, decisions were made, feel free to dislike them, as you do.
And finally, I will not argue on me being "full of shit" or otherwise, but you don't have the full picture on a lot of things, and also what you say is not at all what was described or how it was supposed to work - sometimes marketing talking points don't come from where you think they do, let's just leave it at that. Beyond this, the way the whole cinemelee thing was envisioned never made it into the game (like many other things we were aiming for). As we were running out of time and were not given the option to extend any further, drastic cuts were made, across the board.
We needed another year, that is the truth of it... at the end it was our fault (by our I mean we in a position of leadership, our team did nothing but the most outstanding job possible). Some of the ambitious bets we made worked out well, some did not. I take responsibility for the latter - even when the issues originated from external forces, we should have fought harder or figured out ways to compensate. I am very sorry that the final output did not live up to expectations.