Steve Jackson Games faced this when it became apparent that Ogre Designer's Edition would be later than they expected. But the attitude of most people on their forum is, "It's only late until it ships, but it sucks forever." Meaning they'd rather get the right game late than a bad game on time.
A particularly infamous example occured with the Exalted boxset supplement "Dreams of the First Age". Massively hyped up, but continuously receieved setback as production ran into numerous problems, delayed a total of 5 months after being pushed back 6 times. The increasing irritation at the delays (exacerbated by a.) being the most expensive product to date outside of the Limited Edition Core from First Edition, b.) being a special gift pre-order deal, and c.) being pushed back within a day or two of its supposed release date more than once) combined with the... less than stellar quality of the books (not just in writing and mechanics; the binding was shoddy and incidents of books falling apart within months were widely reported) caused something on an explosion in the fanbase.
The current writing team tend to play a bit fast and loose with release dates in the name of quality. Most notably, Third Edition - originally scheduled for December 2012 - is as of April 2013 not yet released, in the hope of avoiding the crippling mechanical bork-ups that made playing and running Second Edition such an ordeal.
