Well, with 30 developers in one project, one sure deal-breaker is not-enough savvy project management.

I'm not saying that good project management can rescue a surreal ship date no matter what, but bad project management with 30 people involved is never, ever gonna work out, regardless of the language used.

The way you describe how the slip date is handled is a red flag, and I've also seen it up close a saddening number of times. No small slips would be a nice pattern to apply here (and the book, Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development is one of the most encouraging books I've ever read about software project management).

/J

Update: changed the pattern url to a more recent one