I honestly think that all you guys need to do is write out your feature-list, then give somebody complete freedom to execute that list and promise, actually promise, to release when that list is feature-complete.
One of the big problems is that all of the people here who are any good have watched you guys not make it to release, and that signals managerial trouble of some kind; given that your content looks really good, the issue is probably that your game design has remained very fuzzy and at this point you've promised fans a bunch of stuff that is vaporware.
My blunt advice: forget about what you told the fans. They'll love it for the art, even if it's a fairly dull rehash of Warband's gameplay. All those features you promised? They can get done later; what's important at this point is to get a release out and start getting an audience of players and testers, not just fans who are projecting their many, many fantasies about the perfect Warhammer Fantasy Battle experience onto your content
What you do
not want to do at this point is to try and 'manage' a coder, other than handing them a feature list of the must-have things; you've got lots and lots of content and you need a release, pronto.
After a release you can always review and find a new coder if you really didn't like what they did. Then you're back in the driver's seat; if the release doesn't totally suck, finding a coder is a lot more practical.
That's a deal most coders will accept, especially if you folks on the content end are ready and able to respond to their needs in terms of getting content fully functional. From what you folks have shown, most of your work is pretty functional, but it's very hard to evaluate that without seeing it.
But don't kid yourselves; if the project was on track, it would be done by now. Your goal now is to reach a release. You need to stay out of the way of whoever you get, other than setting the feature list and agreeing to some reasonable milestones.
Just to give my personal perspective, I'll share a disaster story of my own.
The last time I let myself get roped into this kind of thing, the initial pitch looked a lot like this: some good content, a strong central leader... and I knew they were having trouble reaching completion. I felt the urge to help, and when they sent me a plea, I agreed to discuss it.
Things started off pretty badly, though... and in retrospect, I should have walked away immediately.
The person who was in control of the content (most of which he hadn't made, but had inherited from others... yeah) emphasized that he was my "boss", even though he couldn't code his way out of a paper bag. Great start, eh? "Hi, I'm going to be your boss, and I don't know anything about what you do or how it works.".
However, it was pretty obvious from the start that my "boss" was an idiot. While he was a reasonable artist, he didn't actually know anything about game design, which is
not mainly "do this with balance, buff this" stuff; it's the deeper understanding of how systems create patterns of statistical behavior, setting up clear goals about how gameplay sessions are expected to unfold and testing your assumptions, etc.
Buffs and nerfs are just polishing, if you've done design correctly; units in these kinds of games are a sum of a lot of very complex parts, and of course in a really complex title like Warband there are all the out-of-combat issues to consider.
Anyhow, suffice it to say that my "boss" was very, very clueless, but insisted that I would take direction from him anyhow.
However, the whole thing was a mess; the main gamecode was a nightmare, the UI wasn't even executed yet, the game-design was bunch of really bad ideas and lots of non-functional content, or even worse, content that had been declared final but was functionally broken- the equivalent of shipping a Warband mod with a bunch of un-rigged armor. Since I can wear all of the hats, I ended up playing technical artist a lot, fixing other people's screwups. Yay; nothing like having to tear apart models vert-by-vert to get rid of seams that weren't welded properly, internal faces and the like- there's nothing I enjoy more than doing that for free
I can't really talk more about the details without revealing what this was, so I'll have to leave the rest it to your imaginations. Suffice it to say that it was a huge pile of suck with the potential of being attractive if it got cleaned up, like a pretty girl with a heck of a coke habit.
Anyhow, I got most of the wrecked project that I inherited fixed up and running, and while it had a lot of content that was old and needed to be rebuilt or re-polished, it was actually fairly functional.
For my reward, I got to hear constant complaining about XYZ balance change, etc. and lots of "debate" about how features would operate from peanut-gallery people who weren't actually doing anything useful but were included in internal team discussion because they were... heck, I'm still not sure, but I
am sure I hate dealing with useless people
So I'd get stuff done and put a new build up, and instead of people saying, "great job, wonderful that so much of the wreckage is finally working" I'd get constant whining about things that weren't all that important or armchair-quarterback complaints about the things that I felt needed to change before the game design would actually be fun from people who manifestly did not know anything about game design other than "buff and nerf".
After 6 months of that, the first 4 spent in feverish labor, and the last two spent being mainly grumpy and gradually feeling totally alienated by this lame situation, I handed the project back to the "boss" and politely told the team that since they wanted to "manage" it but weren't capable of doing any of the important work and were mainly just wasting my time on a regular basis that it was an unworkable situation and that I was quitting.
I was tempted to release it right then and there, because it was playable already and I strongly suspected it would never get released... but I'd agreed to their terms and it would have caused much drama in the community I was in at the time, so that was that.
The project remains a fairly infamous piece of vaporware to this day, which is sad, because by the time I told them I was no longer interested, it was 90% feature-complete, the broken content was all pretty much ready to go and it was quite playable, if rough around the edges. If the art people had stayed on track in terms of updating the older content that wasn't polished at the same pace I'd gotten the code, animation, game design, effects, sounds and the other million little details done, it would have been pretty nice, if not AAA due to some limitations of the engine we were using.
Anyhow... the moral of this story is that
you don't want to be those people
In that vein, as part of your pitch, it would not hurt to release your current source code (not the content, just the code) so that people can evaluate what state it's in and whether or not it should be scrapped or merely completed and bugs fixed. Don't worry about that "ruining" your presentation; players don't give a hoot and nothing in your previous list of features was anything that hasn't been done already.
