That's a very cynical and reductive way of looking at it.
1. They started the project, and built a vertical slice of the game, and the tools required for it.
2. After that slice, they could judge the pace they would have going forward with the rest of the scenes that were now planned.
3. They decided after that to either cut content, or find a way forward with the planned content.
4. They decided on the latter.
Nothing of this is squandering money, nothing of this is irresponsible, nothing of this is bad management. It's just software development.
If you want to use that as a reason to buy and play their games anymore, that's your loss and your choice, but you ought to at least be aware that things are not as simple as you seem to think there.
Again: I never said I don't buy their games at all or play them, and I never said it's that simple. I know costs go over in development all the time, that vertical slices are different from the actual game development itself, and so on.
What I saw when this all went down is that they planned the game, planned enough for the budget they asked for, and went for it. They got way more, thought "whoa, this is cool! we can do more than we thought we could!", which is great: they got extra money! The issue came when, whether due to lack of publisher/executive oversight or overeagerness or whatever, they realized that all the ideas they came up with
after they got the extra money were undoable without even more money. They even said it themselves: "we designed too much game".
It's totally normal to realize that they needed a different budget; my issue with it was that they planned what they could do with $300,000, saw they got $3,000,000, and instead of doing something along the lines of Costume Quest (~$2mil budget), went bigger. It was a miscalculation, which is fine, but imo it was an instance where budget oversight would have been a good thing; they did something similar with Massive Chalice (although they did legit get extra money then put it on Steam Early Access). It's a little hard to really get into numbers outside of Kickstarter given that most companies are super quiet about planned budgets (instead only ever mentioning final development costs, and even those are tough to find). This has happened a few times, but when I watched it be announced in real-time with Broken Age, I found it really interesting and disappointing given how everything was so public. I appreciated them being transparent, given that we need more of that in game development from higher-profile studios, but I also felt it was weird that they expanded the game so much instead of focusing on making the game they'd originally planned, adding extra features from there, and then using the budget to work on really polishing the game (especially with Act 2 having been received less fondly than Act 1).
What does this all boil down to? My opinion is that Double Fine makes some really cute games (I loved Costume Quest; I didn't finish Psychonauts but loved what I played; I have Grim Fandango Remastered and am super excited to get around to playing it). My opinion is
also that Double Fine is known for
overshooting budgets and timelines (Broken Age wasn't the only time), so I don't tend to follow them closely and I pick up their games after they're finished. I'm not insulting Double Fine or Schafer; I'm not ignorant to the realities of games development; I recognize that there are plenty of issues we generally just don't see. I don't think it an unfair opinion to see a studio's games and think "eh, I'll pick it up later", but frankly, the number of responses I'm getting to something that was literally just an aside makes me think that DF's fans can't take even the mildest critique of the studio. Like I've been saying this entire time, I'm not insulting the studio, I don't dislike its output, and continually trying to invalidate my opinion on the matter strikes me as incredibly odd considering none of this is even on-topic.
