The issue here is that the interview you quoted says absolutely nothing about the games development and it wasn't even an official announcement just a reporter cornering a Squenix employee and asking about the game, of which the employee gave a very stock business answer that reveals nothing. SE only really talks about the game when other people bring it up, but for a game to be in development for this long with little to really show for it, this means one of three things: Either something has happened during the development process that has slowed the project down considerably, most likely the staff is trying to build an overly ambitious game engine from scratch which was what happened with FFXII; or Nomura is getting in the way cause he's literally making the team put in every ambitious idea he wants even mid-development and he's making the team redo whole sections of the game that don't meet his standards; or three it's what Ouch! said and it's the higher ups interfering to make sure other projects go smooth while possibly doing some executive meddling of the project themselves.

There is also the fourth reason, which is "all of the above" which I'm beginning to suspect might be the problem. Nomura had some ambitious ideas and the game most likely required some new technology that no one had done before to get it running so a lot of the development is probably this but once it did get running we had the sub-par reception of XIII and the disaster of XIV so SE both wants Versus XIII to stay dark so they can try to salvage XIV but also they are probably getting some heavy focus group going over every part of this game cause SE wants it to succeed. I also suspect that SE may have realized the game in it's current form couldn't work on the PS3 and they may be stalling for the next console cycle.

It just gets exasperating cause there was that one interview with Wada shortly after the Kotaku nonsense, where he mentioned watching a mind blowing video of the city models. That was it, no screenshots, no actual video. For a game that got accused of being vaporware, SE did very little to really calm down the rumor which is why it's still prevalent among news sites and forums. You would think they would have given people something, instead the company just sent a verbal statement saying "We're still working on it" which is the same thing that happened with Duke Nukem Forever.