Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.
I'm pretty sure most programmers who are comfortable in both C++ and assembly language can add working functionality to a program faster in C++ than in assembly. Of course, certain C++ libraries will eliminate that advantage, but choosing to use those libraries isn't essentially different from many other bad decisions you might make about how to write a large program.
Expanding the quote because the word "team" is probably relevant to why it took longer to rewrite. At a certain scale there just is a huge advantage in everything being inside one head...
In this case, they probably were trying to not just rewrite but improve the engine at the same time. That's a much more complicated thing to achieve. Especially when the original is a heavily optimized and probably somewhat hard to reason about blob of assembly. I'm guessing that even wrapping your head around that would be a significant job.
Amazingly enjoyable game btw. Killed quite a few hours with that one around 2000.
I wish my managers would get this. Currently our product shit the fan due to us being understaffed and badly managed due to clueless managers, and what they did was add two more managers to the team to create more meetings and micromanage everrying.
I think the real constraint must be market timing - as much work as people can do to meet the market (eg. Have the thing done by Christmas), that much will end up being done.