As appalling as this is, I can completely understand it happening.
Hypothetically:
AI team invest time building a competent system. Deadline is on the horizon, other teams are struggling.
Everyone panics because the game is over on all sorts of budgets, poor performance, using too much memory, etc.
Stuff gets cut, huge rearrangements, lots of things change radically and rapidly to fight this fire. Absolutely everything gets broken, stability goes out the window, game is an unplayable mess.
Somehow this ini file is accidentally changed in the chaos. All of a sudden, the otherwise competent AI takes a giant crap on itself, but no one noticed because everything else is completely broken.
Deadlines looming. Everything is on fire, bugs everywhere. Everyone is panicking. AI has been drafted to help fight other people's fires.
Finally a stable build, actually can play it without crashing everywhere. First release candidate. No one touch it. AI team is baffled because now the game isn't a broken mess they see the AI isn't working right. Investigate, makes no sense... Everything looks fine, code hasn't changed. WTF...
Deadline hits. They get told they can't make any more changes. Locked down, gotta get it out the door.
AI team is devastated.
Bunch of people quit.
Happens way more often than you'd think.
