I inherently disagree with the notion that they must have put an extraordinarily large amount of effort into the presentation. Sure, there are a lot of cutscenes, that much is true, but how many of them spend their time having the characters stand in place, doing almost nothing but talking? Most of them, actually. And how much of the game's story was lopped off for time and budget concerns? A lot, if the leaked early script is anything to go by. This is coupled with the fact that most of the levels have no unique set pieces, and judging by concept art, had many of their original ideas ripped out before they could be made. So what I'm saying is, just because there was effort put in, which there obviously had to be to get the thing made period, it could not have possibly been a massive priority if so many visual and story elements were cut out of the game.

I think the issues that arose with Forces' gameplay do not necessarily exclusively stem from them poorly allocating most of their development resources to the game's presentation and ignoring the gameplay side of things. I think it's likely a deeper problem than something that simple.