Actually this kind of 'disaster' cancelling occurs quite often in other companies as well. Typically it goes something like:
The company reaches a point like: "We made a few games, we know our trade, we have the cash, now let's do something interesting." Then they throw all their best ideas onto a huge pile, and the game-design sanctioned people try to make sense out of it. At this point, a lot of creativity is already out of the door, since of course, the huge undertaking has to play safe ball to ensure success, and who knows better than anyone else how huge games work except game designers, right? In parallel, work starts on pre-production, concept art, prototyping, level design, game play mechanics, effects, you name it. After a while, it turn out that the really fun bits are not fun at all, no matter how much you tweak them, and everything starts to look like a tech-demo, because everyone is focusing on just a small fraction, and there's no coherence whatsoever. How could there be. Of course by then we're 2 year after the project starts, and canning it is starting to sound expensive. In the end, it comes down to a financial gamble: releasing crap can mean the end of the company (ahum: Destiny). You can sell crap once with success and maybe break even or profit, but you shit most of your loyal fans in the face, and usually they tend to not take that lightly. Or you can cancel, and swallow the loss and work on something that holds the promise to bring more grit (of which, of course, there is no proof yet).
If there's one team that has the money and the minds to work on very ambitious projects, it's Blizzard. And apparently the teams values their future productions and fan-base as more important than selling Titan. That said, Titan did look impressive from the setup, so I hope the tech and team survives.
