Yes, we probably were doing something wrong. That's the point of the post: to explain how easy it is to get into a situation where you are making little progress, and our story of getting out of it. I sincerely hope that others will be able to cope better when faced with a similar situation.

It's easier said than done, though. Development takes significant ramp-up time; if you spend 10 hours a day on it, you get much more than 5 times as much done than if you spend 2 hours a day. We already did what we could in terms of distributing workload amongst people to minimize context-switching.