Well, that's the corperate mentality in action. A system by which things are done collectively by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy so that no one person or group of people can be singled out as being responsible. Passing the buck happens until people get tired of paying attention to the game, and then things fade away. In the best cases you might get some sacrificial lamb staked out by the big wigs, someone who usually didn't have much of anything to do with anything other than to be around as a potential scapegoat.
The problem here of course is that everyone involved in the system probably believes they are genuinely blameless. The guys technically at the top of the food chain probably having no direct control or interaction with the project itself. In many cases the problem is probably some guy early on in the process getting lazy and dialing it in, leading to people working off of that work having their own stuff compromised by default, but by the time it gets so bad that it's destroying the project it's hard to find who the initial culprit was, and by that point it probably doesn't matter anymore anyway since there is no way to fix it without starting over again.
That said, it's also just as likely that the Devs did exactly jack until the last minute and then rushed. Going back years I read a number of rather damning exposes on the entire process, and how it works, which continue to piss people off today when I relay them. One big point of this being that it's wrong to always demonize the publishers for not having a "hands off" approach because left to their own devices Devs are as likely as not to spend all the money,
living off of it, and produce very little. The money going to development going towards human resources and paychecks without much guarantee of what the people are doing with it or even working. A couple of situations where you might notice this trend are with Duke Nukem Forever, where like 30 million dollars was paid to the developers over a period of years with nothing but demos and concept art being produced, and nothing left of the money being used to pay the developers that "worked" on it to be recouped. EA Louse had similar accusations about "The Old Republic Online" (the accuracy of which was a mixed bag) where despite millions upon millions of dollars being sent to the project Bioware actually did very little, being most proud of their "sound design" and needing to have other people rushed in at the 11th hour to try and build an actual game, where ToR-tanic went after that is a matter of record at this point and the list of problems could fill numerous threads with fights and arguements.
The point of course being one where pointing fingers at any paticular person or recouping losses from a bureaucracy is nearly impossible.
To also throw in a Yahtzee-type analogy, let's say your a disgruntled employee who has been fired without cause from a large company. Try and find the person who is responsible for firing you... it might not be as easy as you might think (though sometimes it can be). Your supervisor or manager might have gotten it passed down from upper management, who got it on human resources letterhead, going back to another whole department with it's own network of pencil pushers, and it might very well come down to something being rubber stamped based on a computer algorithim based on wanting to fire everyone with X amount of time and benefits withotu a perfect record so they can bring in shared labour from foreign work exchange programs in shifts to fill your job. It might not, but it could be. So let's say your unpacking your guns to go and avenge the end of your life (losing your house, not having had enough to eat for two weeks, etc...) and take out the person who ruined your life. Who do you shoot? Your supervisor? He just got a memo and was following orders. His boss (management) he just passed the memo, Human resources? The secretaries got their orders up above. The President or Vice President of HR? You might be shocked to learn he doesn't even has any idea who the hell you are since he hangs out playing golf all day with the other prsidents and VPs. Viewed that way you can sort of see why your typical disgruntled employee at a big company decides to hold everyone equally responsible and ops for bombs, or to take out anyone with the most general involvement from executives, to ratty former-co workers, to secretaries who might have pushed the paperwork.
Okay, well that's kind of disturbing to even spell out (and goes beyond Yahtzee in most cases) but the point here is that yeah... I can kind of see how it might be true that Gearbox and company might not have any idea WHO is responsible for a lot of differant reasons. Welcome to corperate America.
Saying that there should be a clear guy in charge who is responsible sounds good, but understand that if your going to work for a job like this with a ton of variables, the first thing your going to want is job security and protection from things like this (honestly, you would, no matter what you say right now) and a big part of this is that protection and a degree of autonomy goes with any kind of desician making position right now. Also on the "darker" bit I mentioned that kind of scenario is also why those who are upper management and wind up making a lot of desicians about employees try and make sure they are as far away and as detached as possible from those employees as possible, perhaps even operating from offices intentionally kept well away from the site of their business.
