EA was willing to delay Andromeda by up to 5 months if it needed it

afaik, mea was actually delayed. like 5 months.

There is only so much extra crunch time you can add to software development until any extra time spent on the project becomes nearly completely ineffective.

If they were really crunching for 18 months, how much longer could they have gone on while remaining somewhat effective?

The game is WAAAAAAAAAY better now than it was at launch. I would give it a score of at least 80% now that it's fixed. 90% if Bioware releases Quarian Ark DLC. The last 10% i cannot give though due to many cringey dialogue lines. But it's still definitely a great game.

The article says that EA expects the game to be released within their fiscal year which ends in march.

Delaying would have fixed most of the bugs and crap animations but not any of the other major faults with the game.

Bad story cant be patched.

Eh, they did with ME3's ending

Delaying Andromeda would have made it less of a joke, but it wouldn't have made it a better game.

Completely different scenario with Andromeda...ME3 ending patched a contained section of the ending which went on to explain the Catalyst and overall situation in a more detailed fashion. It made the ending a bit more easier to understand. The overall journey in ME3 was interesting and exciting...and i never really had an issue with ME3 ending other than i wish they had went with a more traditional ending which either ended the Reaper threat completely or resulted in just delaying the threat.

Andromeda's entire story was lackluster and the side-missions and tasks made it feel like it was all over the place and i felt a real disconnect in some parts of the game...and because of the way the characters are written, i never felt involved or cared about if any of them lived or died....a complete opposite in how i felt about characters actually dying in ME2 and 3....and those are aspects in Andromeda that can't be patched.