Yeah, but he had six years to write the book, even if he took a couple of years off as a break from Dresden.. Where is the planning?
I don't think the
editing side had more time than usual... possibly less time in some ways depending on when the decision to split the book was made.
That's why I made the Wheel of Time comparison. Lots of time, tons of editing and continuity effort since those books were ultra-high-profile... and we still got weird pacing things like two characters' perspective on the same event being in two different books 500 pages apart, which kind of messed up the impact of the second one.
The thing is that the issues in PT look to me like
editing issues not
writing ones. Repetition, continuity issues, Harry not thinking of things he really should have... these are likely things that ought to be caught in editing passes.