The underlying organizational problem then becomes the fact that performance isn't priority number 1. I would suspect that if the perf was taken seriously, some time spent on profiling would immediately reveal this issue.

Performance is not priority number 1. Number 1 is to ship the game on schedule so you can stop crunching for the first time in months, number 2 is to make an interesting game that people pay for and justifies your not getting laid off. The games industry is not a particularly safe place to be in from what I understand.

It is (probably) taken seriously, I am sure they were pushing things to limit to render just one more car or have a one more AI etc. My assumption the loading times just somehow slipped off and no one thought it was a solvable problem or it is just loading performance is not taken as seriously

> My assumption the loading times just somehow slipped off and no one thought it was a solvable problem or it is just loading performance is not taken as seriously

That does sounds like awfully like confirming that indeed no-one was curious, because they were too busy chasing KPIs or whatever other metrics management were using.

If was the number one complaint about the game. R* is one of the biggest studios around. It would have cost them nothing to just hire a developer whose only task is to hound down that bug and fix it.

It could've been waved off if there wasn't single player part of that same game that loaded few times faster.