Let's say I said that because there were numerous strange issues inside BWO team, and while I barely touched them, I'm at least partially aware what was happening. I disappeared before BWO died for personal reasons, but still I had access to internal, and heard numerous stories. Let's just not continue this. In short: BWO in old development model never had a chance to happen.
What exactly are you talking about? Because besides that debacle with Goober (which became quite public eventually), I don't see what was "strange" about the issues inside the team:
In the last years, when the decision was made to make development more public and opening the doors to more people, things weren't strange at all: someone would offer to help, they'd do some work and then disappear, for whatever reasons. Even when we decided to let model creators to release most of the work they'd get done for the project. You even saw the fruits of that: Blackwolf released the Ceres, Dagger was supposed to release a variant of the Aaru but I'm not sure if he ended up finishing that. In fact, bar 1 or 2 assets, the idea was that I was taking care of the "exclusive" models myself, so that any other modeler that would help out could release their work as soon as they finished it, and also to give them more creative space and autonomy. I'm not sure if you were still around when we started doing that, though. But already for a while there was no "old development model" as you label it. We changed it completely.
There was also the issue that at some point, I was taking on more and more management responsibilities instead of creating, and that culminated right before life forced me to vanish from HLP. But basically, at some point and with the small amount of time I had, I wasn't just taking care of model creation and art direction, but I "had to" manage things in pretty much every department: talk to people, find solutions, review\create documentation, tabling, etc etc. I obviously came up short on that. I overextended. But someone had to try and do it anyway.
That part of my responsibilities intensified even more when Spoon and Battuta offered to help, to get them up to speed. Spoon was working at an amazing speed that unfortunately I couldn't keep up with, which prompted his (understandable) leaving. I also feel there were some miscommunication issues with Spoon. And those are on me, 100%.
These were issues, but by no means they were "strange". So what "strange issues" are you talking about?