I'm pretty sure the problem in the first place was a problem of scale concerning the project.
They had too high ambitions and probably wanted to make a bigger / better MMOFPS that would have been remember for a decade.
That's pretty much what I feel like when I take a look at the old articles of the game and the screenshots.
They seems to be this massive thing that even managed to end up as an embryo in the game.
For example, there's something absolutely useless that got implemented in the final game:
The customization.
It's a typical thing for large scale game (or call of duty fps, but it serves as a rank purpose well defined here).
It was absolutely unnecessary to give us such a wide choice of skins, abilities, weapons customization with the kind of game we got since it has a level much lower in terms of development than any previous game.
I think they had big eyes, and wanted to make something incredible, probably way too much incredible.
First concept arts suggested we would see earth, space stations, asteroid stations, LV-426 and some uncharted worlds.
We ended up with simply an homage to ALIENS locations and some generic random places.
It's pretty obvious that all we see in game was already done back in 2008/2009.
I think what actually happened is that they spent way too much time brainstorming and saw that SEGA would not let them make this kind of scaled project telling them to keep low (lack of finance).
I'm sure they had a load of money to make a AAA game but not enough to make an incredible scale game.
So stuck in the middle, they packed up the game as it was, spent some money on communication and took the rest that was not enough to make their epic scale game.
I'm pretty sure everyone in the end is disappointed.
SEGA for their wallet, gearbox for being finally able to work on an Alien game (which studio wouldn't be happy to get to work on a AAA star wars / alien game?) and not being able to do what they wanted and the consumer who was in the middle of all this terrible storm.
Back then I remembered that I hated Pitchford and Gearbox, but now that I think about it, I think they are as much pissed off as we are.
It all got pretty clear when I played Alien Isolation.
The game is near perfect. Atmosphere, gameplay, engine, blablabla.
The only thing this could happen is because they remained pretty low and safe in their ambitions. You have a very little amount of objects, updates, the story is pretty simple and happens in the same place.
Gearbox on the other hand wanted too much, like different pulserifle variations, a lot of new aliens from comic books, hell they even spent time to figure out if the 95 magazine of the pulserifle was possible.
I'd bet it's what killed the game because the initial ambition there was back in 2008 was incredibly positive and supportive.
It's probably also the fact I do mods for AVP2 that lowered my standard.
Everyone wants too much, I remember back being a tester for AJL mod that people thought it would be a good idea to have aliens capable of making a hive in a map, then being able to drag a player to incubate him and spawn an army of AI.
Nice idea, I'm pretty sure all Aliens fans always thought it would be cool (and I'm sure Gearbox thought so too) but the amount of work required to do that is astronomical.