Those poor devs. I bet some of them had come up with great ideas, which they had to watch overruled by marketing people.
I bring this up only because I find when I do this blaming of <other non-build people>, I often miss the problem that is actually in front of my face and can actually impact.
From my experience: as a game dev we ALWAYS know when a game sucks. Maybe some director or other director level person strongarmd it, so it's not like engineers can't be blind. But as a general consensus, I've met very few "bad devs" from a technical POV (a vector consumers often like to attack when they see bad gameplay). We work with a bad hand and we almost never get the extra time needed when we try to show publishers. Fortunately, it's a lot easier now to argue for delays than over a decade ago.