Yep. The studio didn't know what the hell to do with it.

I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.

I’m sure they did demand that

I think director's in that era can avoid this by not doing extra takes for scenes that would never make it anyways. Mike Judge did not have the budget for that anyways.

Nowadays they just change the scenes in post anyways, leading to some of the worst and most atrocious continuity errors.