Comment by horsawlarway

The general thrust of my argument is this:

"There is a limited amount of time, money, and effort that will be spent on any project. Successful enterprises focus those limited resources on the things that matter most to their customers. In this case, disk usage in the ~150gb range did not matter much in comparison to the other parts of the game, such as in-game content, missions, gameplay, etc."

We know this, because the game had a very successful release, despite taking 150gb to install.

I'm not saying they should have filled that 100 extra gb with mission content - I'm implying they made the right call in focusing their engineering manpower on creating content for the game (the ACTUAL gameplay) and not on optimizing storage usage for assets. That decision gave them a popular game which eventually had the resources to go optimize storage use.