The only sane way to judge "professional excellence" would be holistically, not by asking "has this person or team ever shipped a bug?" If you disagree, then I hope you are judged the same way during your next review.
In the case of HD2 I'd say the team has done well enough. The game has maintained player base after nearly two years, including on PC. This is rare in the world of live service games, and we should ask ourselves what this tells us about the overall technical quality of the game - is the game so amazing that people keep playing despite abysmal technical quality?
The technical quality of the game itself has been somewhat inconsistent, but I put hundreds of hours into it (over 1K, I think) and most of the time it was trouble-free (and fun).
I would also note that the PC install size issue has only become egregious somewhat recently. The issue was always there, but initially the PC install size was small enough that it wasn't a major issue for most players. I actually never noticed the install size bug because I have a $75 1TB drive for games and even at its worst, HD2 consumed only a bit over 10% of that.
It certainly must have been challenging for the developers. There has been a constant stream of new content, and an entirely new platform (Xbox) added since release. Perhaps more frustratingly for the development team, there has also been a neverending parade of rebalancing work which has consumed a lot of cycles. Some of this rebalancing work was unavoidable (in a complex game, millions of players will find bugs and meta strategies that could never be uncovered by testing alone) and some was the result of perhaps-avoidable internal discord regarding the game's creative direction.
The game is also somewhat difficult to balance and test by design. There are 10 difficulty levels and 3 enemy factions. It's almost like 30 separate games. This is an excellent feature of the game, but it would be fair to Arrowhead for perhaps biting off more than any team can chew.
In the case of HD2 I'd say the team has done well enough. The game has maintained player base after nearly two years, including on PC. This is rare in the world of live service games, and we should ask ourselves what this tells us about the overall technical quality of the game - is the game so amazing that people keep playing despite abysmal technical quality?
The technical quality of the game itself has been somewhat inconsistent, but I put hundreds of hours into it (over 1K, I think) and most of the time it was trouble-free (and fun).
I would also note that the PC install size issue has only become egregious somewhat recently. The issue was always there, but initially the PC install size was small enough that it wasn't a major issue for most players. I actually never noticed the install size bug because I have a $75 1TB drive for games and even at its worst, HD2 consumed only a bit over 10% of that.
It certainly must have been challenging for the developers. There has been a constant stream of new content, and an entirely new platform (Xbox) added since release. Perhaps more frustratingly for the development team, there has also been a neverending parade of rebalancing work which has consumed a lot of cycles. Some of this rebalancing work was unavoidable (in a complex game, millions of players will find bugs and meta strategies that could never be uncovered by testing alone) and some was the result of perhaps-avoidable internal discord regarding the game's creative direction.
The game is also somewhat difficult to balance and test by design. There are 10 difficulty levels and 3 enemy factions. It's almost like 30 separate games. This is an excellent feature of the game, but it would be fair to Arrowhead for perhaps biting off more than any team can chew.