I don't get why people always feel the need to point fingers at Nomura and how he supposedly can't get a game done in a timely manner whenever trying to defend Tabata.
I mean, I'd imagine it's pretty hard to get a project as big as this finished when your company keeps taking away your team to work on XIII sequels and fixing the hot mess that was vanilla XIV. Versus XIII was obviously not a priority for Square at the time, and their management was kind of a mess last gen and I don't see how this is Nomura's fault.
Something a lot of people also fail to mention is that, in said period of time Nomura apparently spent doing nothing but "wasting resources" on Versus XIII, he directed and released Birth By Sleep, 358/2 days, Coded, Dream Drop Distance and also played a big part in The World Ends With You. Meanwhile, in the same period of time, Tabata directed Crisis Core, The 3rd Birthday and Type-0. Doesn't look like there's some huge discrepancy between the two of them as far as productivity is concerned.
Kingdom Hearts 3 seems to be doing just fine right now. I'm also pretty sure Square wouldn't have given him what is arguably their most important project in years if he was some incompetent slob who couldn't get a game off the ground to save his life.
I get it, it's boring to see people complain about Tabata all the time and wonder what the project would've been like had Nomura stayed as a Director, but there's no need to keep pushing this "only Tabata could get things done" narrative. And I say this as someone who isn't very fond of Nomura's works (to be fair, neither do I care much for Tabata's) and is still interested in the game in its current form.
