It makes absolutely no sense to continue work exclusively on COD. They've already received most of the money they are ever going to get from that product and past reviews will haunt it.
This is the beauty of the Sequel system, you can start almost fresh with new reviews of the next Sequel. The beta version of COD was released with an unfinished buggy game engine, which is not surprising as most betas are unfinished
. They've had two years to rewrite the graphic code that should make COD playable on peoples systems, but the gameplay and bugs still need alot of work. We will have to see how many bugs and other issues are left after the RC patch for COD, but I'm sure there will still be issues.
The release of stability/performance RC patch for COD will free up the lead programmer to do further finetuning on the game engine. The developers have said the Sequel won't reach Alpha stage until 2013, this will give them another year or two to concentrate on issues other than the games performance and stability, which should see fixes in the game engine, features, and bugs. The sales, reviews of the Sequel, and the developments future depend on it being relatively good.
A fixed game engine will remove most of the issues COD had, and should make the Sequel far more successful, with the corresponding good reviews that should make most everyone move on from the disaster of the COD.
In the next year or two before the Sequels release, how much the standalone COD will improved is anyones guess, We will most likely have to buy the Sequel to see some of the improvements to COD. Yes people have suggested they'll never buy another game from the developer, but most will, unless there are no improvements, or there is a better WW2 aircombat sim on the market. The only WW2 sim coming soon is WT, but I'm still not sure it will be good enough to drag many people away from the IL-2 franchise. Time will tell. Hopefully they will be successful, and people will have both sims on their hard drives.