““We were finally at a state in the project where we could play through the whole [game]. And it became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to tie the story together and have a satisfying action-filled payoff,” Shen said. “I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time. The entire quest design team was already overbooked.””
The quest design team being overbooked and not having time certainly explains a lot.
I think the “just keep going” was a Tod Howard demand, his ideal game is a LLM that generates endless radiant quests. Generated content has been a hallmark of everything he’s touched, and it’s always a low-point in that game because he expects it to stand by itself, instead of using it as a tool for the designers to build off of.