Mac is correct in that Cat's example does not fully match up to her point. Living with her parents does not inhibit her from working on TSL, nor does a limited amount of foruming time, by definition, mean a lack of time to work on TSL.
Not so. Her example is that as she is living with her parents for a while, she no longer has time to complete her responsibilities as a moderator so actively due to the responsibilities which she has to take on from living with her parents.
Her point is that a lack of forum time for a moderator is a direct equivalent upon analogy to a lack of development time for a developer. The fact that to her, there is a causal relationship between living at home with her parents and her lack of forum time also demonstrates her point well that such externalities as living with roommates/family, getting married, changing jobs, etc. can cause the team to take on higher priority obligations.
It is further true that the higher a priority a person places on something, the more probable is it will get done, and that humans are capable of remarkable efforts and achievements in pursuit of something they greatly desire.
No and yes. A higher priority is not a direct corollary to probability: (to relapse into absurd hyperbole) placing a high priority on making man-powered flight a competitor with space flight or supersonic jets in no way increases the probability of success (the probability of death or serious harm perhaps, but not success).
It is still true that humans can accomplish a lot when they really want to do something. However, wanting to do something doesn't move that something to the top of the priority queue in any realistic priority system. For instance, I'd like to spend more time studying Gaelic than I do, but I don't spend more time studying Gaelic because there's a higher priority placed on getting through college, which means a higher priority is assigned to all the lesser goals that go into getting through college, leaving very little for Gaelic.
Now, replace me with the TSL team and Gaelic with TSL and college with life, and that's the current status of TSL.
Team members have other priorities than TSL, and thus spend the effort on other things. If you agree or do not agree with this prioritization is irrelevant. It is reality.
I don't think agreement is the problem (I guess, that you don't either). Somehow, these discussions of the progress of the game seem three-sided to me: you have fans talking with disheartened fans/hecklers, and the team or PR staff explaining that the team members happen to have lives too which--who would have thought it-- present problems of their own that happen to trump TSL.