Originally Posted by
Formalhaut
It's now turning into a situation where there's two 'larger' gentlemen trying to walk through the same door at the same time. They get stuck, and are squeezed in the narrow doorway, slowing them both down.
This is basically what I think has happened.
Except that development of Kingdom Hearts III has been going on for only slightly more than a year at best. For that analogy to make since, Kingdom Hearts III would have needed to be in development since around 2006 when Final Fantasy Versus XIII was first announced, but that's apparently not the case. Nomura commented (I believe it was in a Famitsu article) that he thought announcing KH3 last year was too soon because they've only just started the development process (notable with the Osaka team responsible for Birth by Sleep, which I think is a good thing).
As for consolidating the story, polishing KH3, and pushing it out the door, I think you're severely overestimating exactly where we are in Kingdom Heart III's development cycle and also severely underestimating how important most games are to the series's narrative. With the exception of Re:Coded, every "spin-off" title on the various handheld consoles are crucially important.
This isn't going to be like Kingdom Hearts II where you can go in without having played Chain of Memories. There is no mechanism through which Sora has forgotten what happened so you can be just as confused as he is as you go along. While Re:Coded itself is virtually useless to the story, it informed major characters about some of the events of Birth by Sleep and 358/2 Days. They've put themselves in a position where they can't just pretend these games didn't happen for those who haven't played them. This is why we're getting the re-releases for PS3 bringing all of the disparate handheld games onto a single platform (with the exception of Dream, Drop, Distance, which itself is hugely important).
The series doesn't make sense only because they've put some maybe important pieces of the plot on so many different devices, and if you haven't been able to play all of them, it's very difficult to make sense of the greater whole. Hopefully Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and Kingdom Hearts 2.5 can help bridge that gap before KH3 comes out, but we need to be realistic--we're not getting it any time soon, even if they have moved to a new development team and are no longer waiting on the core team that developed KH1 and KH2 to finish FFXV.