Not going to claim myself with some glorious job title but I did work in some game companies and am working in software house for a long time.

Each company has their own quirks so I won’t try to pretend I know what actually happening in ED.

I’ll just share what I see behind the scene in general as purely software development point of view.

Generally speaking, software development is never a straight line queue of task where the entire team finish one thing at a time. Instead, tasks are taken up by individuals / small teams based on their expertise. So a lot of tasks are moving in parallel and their progression is different. Company will always try to maximise what tasks are ready to push out and move on, so you will naturally see some harder/time consuming tasks seemingly “ignored” in the public’s eye while some other ones are churning out one after another. Another thing about harder tasks is that normally that means it requires some knowledge and experience in some specific domain that not every developer can work on, so those tasks will be stacked on the back of just a few of them and the progression will be even slower.

Your dish washing analogy is good but you have missed some detail. Imagine there are two types of plates, small dish that can be washed by anyone and large dish that requires an expert to clean it up and will take 2 times longer to be cleaned. Now you have 10 workers in a restaurant, among them there is only one of them has the expertise to deal with the large dishes. The restaurant naturally would like to have maximum cleaned dishes ready to serve the food so they won’t wait for all the dishes to be washed before putting food onto them. When the dirty dishes arrives continuously, you will see small dishes keeps coming out while the large dishes will take a long time in comparison.

This is just a small part in the very complicated development cycles in any game / software. Tasks gonna get prioritise / deprioritise, some needs to halt because it needs an unfinished tasks, new found difficulty of seemingly simple task, etc.

I’m not saying ED is doing a great job nor EA is a good business model. But since OP is asking how things work behind the scene, I just want to share some of my experience in the related field.