Development times haven't really gotten longer and longer, except in the outlier special cases (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls). What generally happens is that you see these games in the news that have had long incubation or troubled development periods where they keep going in circles for years, and then finally must commit to finishing the game and take two to three years to ship the game.
The real way to stop this from happening is a stronger production team that enforces decision commitment and completion urgency on the development team. There's no technology in the world that can make commitment-phobic leadership finalize needed decisions. In many such situations, making a real choice means accepting the benefits and drawbacks of that choice. Real drawbacks are always less appealing than a theoretically yet-undiscovered perfect answer without any drawbacks, even if a perfect solution isn't actually feasible. Lack of decision commitment is the primary reason for long, meandering development cycles.
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