No love lost indeed. Page 5 seems to summarise that sentiment most succinctly. I didn't consider that Origin's reputation was so tarnished by the game. Also, though it may be a one-sided statement, page 11 and 19 show Erin Roberts in a pretty poor light.
Well, if you think about it, Privateer 2 is pretty much the embodiment of what "tarnished reputation" means. Origin had a reputation for always putting out well-polished products. When one product is released that fails to meet this level of quality, that reputation is tarnished. Keep in mind, "tarnished" is not the same as "lost". The CS staff weren't worried about customers never buying an Origin game again - they were simply pointing out that where previously, the quality of an Origin title was a certainty for customers, it would no longer be so in the future because of Privateer 2. That table comparing customer support for P2 with other Origin titles speaks volumes. It's not that the user feedback is overwhelming (as it probably would be in the future with U8 and U9), actually it was probably on par with what many other companies were experiencing, because the mid-1990s were a time of very buggy releases - it's just that when you compare it to previous titles from Origin, those stats looks awful.
The Erin Roberts bit is definitely the most interesting part of the document. I already knew Privateer 2 was an awful game, and I already knew the UK team had failed to implement a lot of feedback from Origin, but I always thought it was just because they were pig-headed - as it turns out, the team never got the memo, because Erin Roberts seems to have kept the feedback away from them. However, as you say, it's one-sided (which is of course exactly how a document like this will always be, because the objective isn't to put out neutral conclusions, but to bring issues from the CS to the table), so this shouldn't be taken to mean that Erin Roberts was a terrible producer who messed up the game, though there is definitely an implication that he did not do the job as well as should be expected.
Based on my own experiences, let me say a few things in his defence. You know, I've been in similar situations, stuck in that middle ground between the team and the feedback from the head office. The key thing to keep in mind here is that the head office is never a monolith delivering one set of feedback. It's actually several separate streams of feedback from different people who make no attempt to coordinate their messages. It always comes down to the producer being expected to juggle multiple balls, and ultimately, for the producer, the question isn't even how to juggle all those balls at once, but simply - which ones he can afford to drop at any point.
The scenario I can imagine actually taking place here is as follows:
1. The team is making a game. They have their own vision, they presented their own estimates for how long everything will take, and EA has accepted these estimates as deadlines. Erin Roberts, as the guy who worked on Privateer, is making sure that the vision is sound, but he is not necessarily there from day one. He may have been sent in after a few months, when someone started getting concerned that the game was not heading in the right direction (see #2 below).
2. Things start going wrong. It's one thing to have a sound vision. It's another to put it together.
Someone (Erin Roberts? EA? Origin is not in the picture yet at this stage) is taking things for granted. The team is getting frustrated, because Privateer was built upon several previous iterations of WC games, and most game subsystems only needed to be tweaked a bit, while here, everything needs to be implemented from scratch. The team had its deadlines, remember? But these deadlines were calculated based on the features that the team had planned. Now they're finding out that they are expected to add other features because they can't backtrack in comparison to Privateer, but no extra time is being given, because these features are supposedly small things. The line that they are probably hearing time and again is as follows: "Come on, guys, we had [comm videos/mouse control/whatever] in Privateer, how hard can it be to add that here?" But this is a new engine, and there's simply no time to implement everything.
3. As a consequence, people start making tradeoffs. The team scales back on some of the features
they wanted to implement - perhaps limiting them, or simply implementing them in a shoddy fashion - in order to add into the schedule some of the features that EA or Erin Roberts wants them to implement. Time and again, (probably) Erin Roberts is asked to approve compromises along these lines: "Well, we can't implement an animated comm video system... but how about if we just put a small picture there? We'll hack together the pictures from dev team photos, and we'll write and record the taunts right here. It will be fun!"
4. Finally, the game is complete enough to send to the QA team at Origin. The team looks at it, and is horrified - it's a mess. Dozens of features have literally been compromised. They send their feedback to Erin Roberts. He is shocked - he'd been in this trench for so long, he's so used to these compromises, that he simply hadn't realised how unacceptable they might be for others. He's also angry, in the team's name - so they had put all this extra effort in order to implement at least a vestigial comm system, and now the guys from Origin are whining that there's no proper animations? I'm picking on the comm system here, by the way, because it's an easy example to imagine, not because it's so crucial to the game. It's not that Erin doesn't like the feedback, he may well agree with it - but he knows it cannot all be done, and he knows that ultimately, he's responsible to the execs who approved the budget and schedule, not to the QA guys. There will be real consequences for his team if they fail to meet their deadlines - but if they get the game out with a few unpolished features, only the QA guys will complain. It may also be that the Erin and the team are so caught up in the game, that they genuinely think it's a great title that the QA team is just picking on. Remember, it's the team's first title of this kind, and they have much to be proud of. Unfortunately, developers often get too caught up in their work to realise that just because you can be proud of doing something for the first time doesn't mean that it's actually good work. It's like a five-year-old proud of his wonky drawing, and expecting that everyone else compare it to the Mona Lisa simply because it's the best that he can do. I'm not saying this is Erin's attitude - he may well realise that the game is not as good as he wanted, but with the deadline fast approaching, he does not want to demoralise the team by bursting their bubble. If you've got someone working twelve hours a day six days a week to get the game done on time, the last thing you want is to tell him that actually, unless he works sixteen hours a day seven days a week, the game will ultimately
5. To conceal what is going on, Erin Roberts time and again tells the QA guys at Origin that this or that cannot be done. What he actually means is that it cannot be done without compromising the release schedule or pulling someone off other tasks - in other words, he does not mean it cannot be done, but that he does not want to do it. It's a reasonable approach that all producers use sometimes, but it will have consequences later on - not the least of which is the fact that when the QA team later starts dealing with Paul Hughes, they will wind up thinking that Erin Roberts had simply fobbed them off with lies. He said this and that cannot be done, but Paul Hughes says it's no problem! He's a terrible liar! Well, no, that's not true. He simply did not explain to them the reasons why he didn't want to do something - he should have, but it probably would not have changed anything. For Paul Hughes, after the game's release, priorities are different - instead of EA breathing down his neck to meet the deadline, he's got EA breathing down his neck to address the problems that QA and now Customer Support are reporting: obviously he'll appear to be more cooperative.
6. On top of all that, add in the usual communications issues: when Erin Roberts tells them that something cannot be done, while Paul Hughes didn't even know the issue existed, that doesn't mean Erin didn't really talk to anyone about it. He was there on location, so he probably figured - I'll talk to the programmer first, ask him how much time he needs, and
then if it's reasonable, I'll discuss it with Paul. Since the answer he got from the programmer made it seem like the issue is not worth bothering with, Paul Hughes never found out about it. These issues exist on the other end, as well - if Erin Roberts did reply to the QA feedback that the game's schedule does not allow him to fix this or that problem, this could well have been garbled locally at Origin into "Erin just said they can't do it".
All of the above is just guesswork - I'm digging into my own experiences to show the various ways these things can go wrong, but I obviously am not claiming that this is what happened in the case of Privateer 2. There are doubtless many other possibilities. The point is - while obviously the QA team at Origin was justifiably bitter because they had put in lots of work in testing the game and providing feedback only to find themselves ignored, it is impossible to pin the blame on just one person. The reality on the ground would have been too complex for that.