I'm not even going to tell you how long it took and how complex it was to replace one single icon sometimes in Vista. I worked in the Windows UX team at the time and tried really hard during Windows 7 to improve that process, because there were so many people involved and so many hours spent for such simple things. So yes, I believe what this guys is saying about his feature is possible - to swap an icon we sometimes had to track a ridiculous number of people, wait several builds to see it, and get approval from a room full of people many times several management levels above me.
I fought similar battles (but at a much smaller scale) trying to change some of inane dialog box text/tooltips in InfoPath for a feature I owned as a PM. I was an intern, but the pushback was rarely along the lines of "Your version isn't better" but rather "We can't handle the globalization/internationalization/testing/etc burden of making the change."
Yup. Which is even more frustrating. Many times you got everybody to agree it would be better the way you are trying to do, but for whatever reasons that seem to be out of control of every person involved in the process, it can't be done. It's sad actually. A company full of people with the right ideas and skills that can't put those ideas in practice because the operation and processes are getting in their way.
