Except the XIII Trilogy was working with an established engine and world which is a hell of lot easier to make a game quickly if you don't have to hire people to create a world, characters, gameplay and graphics engine from scratch. Of course the XIII Trilogy came out in a timely manner, because it already took them five years to make FFXIII since the original concept was thought up in 2004.

I'm not saying Versus XIII/XV's development has not been a train wreck and will probably stand shamefully next to the likes of Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever as development hell horror stories. Yet I would point out that previous FFs have given us far less. Hell XIII and XII received very lukewarm responses by fans from their demos, but a demo just shows you an aspect of the game and FF demos are known for being pretty jarring and giving off no answers and having very unpolished and unfinished gameplay.