Crunch is typically the result of poor planning or design on the fly or by focus-group. So, to that end, it's not the crunch's fault, even though it sucks, it's the fault of design and production not getting their ducks in a row.
Maybe, but that's not quite what their survey showed:
The four strongest correlations with our crunch-related questions were:
+0.51: “There was a lot of turnover on this project.”
+0.50: “Team members would often work for weeks at a time without receiving feedback from project leads or managers.”
+0.49: “The team’s leads and managers did not have a respectful relationship with the team’s developers.”
-0.49: “The development plan for the game was clear and well-communicated to the team.”
(+ = this response was positively correlated with crunch)
The OP gets into that -- the main secondary point of the article is that when these things go wrong (as they sometimes do), a "crunch" approach actually decreases the likelihood that the project will succeed. It just makes things worse.
In other words, the medicine has awful side-effects, and it doesn't even treat the illness.
