I think what makes this a bit different from the usual "time/value tradeoff" discussion is bloating the size by 6x-7x was the result of unnecessary work in the name of optimization instead of lack of cycles to spend on optimization.

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mort96 2 days ago | parent [-]

Eh probably not, it's probably handled by some automated system when making release builds of the game. Sure, implementing that initially was probably some work (or maybe it was just checking a checkbox in some tool), but there's probably not much manual work involved anymore to keep it going.

Reverting it now though, when the game is out there on a million systems, requires significant investigation to ensure they're not making things significantly worse for anyone, plus a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't outright break stuff.

	▲	zamadatix 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Reverting it now was certainly a pile of work, but that's neither here nor there for the portion of the story bothering people. It's like they threw rocks threw the windows years ago to make them slightly clearer to see through and now put a ton of work in to undo that because they discovered that made no sense in reality. It's great they did all the work to fix it after the fact, but that doesn't justify why it was worth throwing rocks through the window in the first place (which is different than not doing optimizations).