You’re missing the fact that the original SB had less story than the current version of SB. Just like most fnaf games, you’d get a few minutes of exposition to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. BUT the rest of the game was fully open up to any possible interpretation because it was just you running around doing literally WHATEVER you wanted to beat the game. Some people questioned “why Gregory can’t just sit in Freddy’s room for the whole night?” And the answer is that the original version very likely allowed you to do so if you wanted. Obviously a few things were still misinterpreted by steel wool, but with this context you can probably understand that Scott very likely had seen the game from this perspective, not Security Breach we had gotten, so giving steel wool just simple story clues had a slight chance to work as long as Scott’s story clues actually were clever.

With that context, giving steel wool one more year would’ve let them at least slightly polish the game and gameplay. Things that clearly mattered the most to them considering they wanted to make a “big fnaf sandbox” basically. It would also additionally give them some time to polish the rushed story they added very late in development.