Bull****. Campaigns die because they never complete their mods, feature creep the mods for new and shiney ones that never materalize, or because they don't build their missions. I've been inside the delay spiral a few times by now, sometimes as FREDder, usually as a tester. BWO radically rebuilt a mission based on tester comments that it just wasn't working in its current form in three days, counting intermediate steps. Other campaigns I've tested for have accomplished major changes to their missions based on the existence of plotholes in less time.
Testing and revision is never the cause of significant delay. There is absolutely no excuse for releasing a mission to the public with major bugs in it.
No? Well as an example, taking the recent interview with Ransom. On the gamewarden forums he expected to release Project 03 in October 2006. Now it's almost October 2009, 3 years later, and in the interview he said he has revisited/reworked 2/3rds of the missions? Of course I don't know the full story behind the project but I would call 3 years, for revisions, a significant delay wouldn't you? Even Droid's campaign, he says he finished it last year, it is now 9 months into 2009. I don't know how lengthy his campaign is, but 9 months is a significant amount of time as well.
I'm not talking about bugs either. Of course playtesting should be done to get rid of most of the bugs which make the campaign unplayable. I'm talking about re-doing entire missions because the design no longer meets the standards of the FREDder. Or perhaps the mission isn't "just quite right" anymore. With every mission a FREDder makes their skills potentially improve, if someone wanted all their missions to be at the quality of the last mission at the time of release, then they'd be perpetually re-making all the missions and there'd be no end to it. At some point you just have to release the thing and move on.
158th shouldn't have been released in its current form. A few days of testing would have caught the major problems.
Realizing that there are problems, and addressing those problems are two different things. There is only one real bug in the 158th campaign that I've encountered, that was in mission 3 (aside from project limits being broken). It may take only a few days to playtest, but it will takes weeks or months to rework it because most of the flaws that I perceive were in the overall mission and campaign design itself. So a person is stuck with the same thing, never finished, and loses motivation and just quits working on it . . .
Creating campaigns and other content is all about motivation and momentum. You can concentrate on a campaign, and get a lot of work done, or you can lose focus, go play Halo or join your 5th campaign project and leave the other 4 projects on the six year backburner. And when it comes to motivation and momentum, doing revisions is a real killer. Again, this is not about fixing bugs, any campaign should be play-tested for bugs by at least the author before release. But story revisions, re-doing entire missions, so on, that can be a terrible drain on motivation and it's the loss of motivation to do work that really kills campaigns.
Maybe the difference here is that I'm mildly OCD and you're mildly ADD. 
No I'm the sort of person who starts many things and never finishes any of them. So in that mentality, finishing something is where the real value is. That being said I never half-ass things, which in itself is part of the problem because I often overdo things and they then become unrealistic and unattainable. Also I'm a terrible procrastinator, and so I often find any way I can of avoiding work. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the work I've done for Freespace wasn't done when I should've been concentrating on something else.
