Anyone in the industry will hear "12-month development schedule" and immediately grimace. You can't make a complete game in 12-months, not one of that scale, let alone one the size of KotOR II. It's not possible. So you get Jedi Knight II, a functioning game with mediocre content, or you get KotOR II, a broken game with great content that gets abandoned near the end.

This is symptomatic of most (all) major publishers, but LucasArts seems to have it down to an exact science at this point. I think the only reason KotOR managed to largely avoid these issues is that BioWare was simply too large, too established, and too concerned about its (excellent) reputation to allow LucasArts to bully them. A startup developer working on sequels doesn't have the same luxuries that the world's premiere RPG powerhouse does. I'll be curious to see whether Obsidian is given more time on Neverwinter Nights 2. 'Course ... I didn't like the first game, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.