I've wondered about the usefulness of the "what went wrong" section of the Game Developer postmortems, given that they are all games that actually shipped. It's possible that the "what went wrong" problems are things that might have jeopardized the project had they been worse. But it's also possible that these problems are simply aspects of successful projects, and that trying to fix them would make the project less likely to succeed.

For example, a lot of postmortems complain about not spending enough time creating artist tools. Does this mean spending a lot of time on tools will make your project more successful? Or does it mean that all the teams that spent enough time on tools didn't have enough resources to complete their projects (and thus didn't get postmortems)?