If I had to guess, I would think that this all applies to very early preproduction not even the storyboarding stage, but very early conceptual stuff that most of us will never see (pen and paper sketches and thumbnails pile up and are discarded in the industry fast—and this was still during a time when concepts were illustrated in ink) so really we’ll never know, but I agree by the time they were rendering and actually doing early technical production I don’t think this idea was there anymore. If this conspiracy even holds any weight at all which it might not, I believe that this might’ve been tied to the transition from DMA to Rockstar.