It's a shame the likes of LMA Manager have fallen by the wayside as it has allowed SI to become in my opinion very complacent.
In regards to "Building the game from the ground up" it sounds more like they are porting a lot of the original material over to Unity reading between the lines.
Not being a game developer though I cannot really offer a definite answer on that as I have no idea what kind of task that would be.
But like others have said we are not talking about 12 months of rushed work - we have been told they have been working on this for years.