PD is a mysterious company. They seem to do an awful lot of technology development and get away with some weird stuff with no negative consequences. Like sure, games sales are down but to be honest theyre down across the board in the genre, and sony doesnt seem to care all that much. Theyre still given what seems to be very few time constraints, or just very few limitations in general. For years now its almost seemed to me as if PD is actually a game developer second, Tech R&D first. They always seem to have some wacky and wild new technology to put in their games; sometimes that technology is so advanced that its more of a tax on the system than its worth to some people. Not me of course, I love watching them go nuts and try their hardest to crash my ps4.
For example: their recent endevours with ray-tracing, and cheating ray-tracing using a PS4. Thats so cool, and a huge resource consumer, but it looks awesome and no-one else is doing it. The fidelity jump between playing GT6 at the Nordschleife during the day, then doing the same on GTS is honestly a bigger jump than PS2 to PS3 to my eyes.
What im trying to get across (despite actually just rambling) is maybe PD seems so invincible because Sony is just using them to showcase their technology and research new technology, and using them to do more or less whatever they want in the meantime. PD honestly seems to care more about technology than actually making an enjoyable game at this point (I say that despite enjoying theyre latest installments almost as much as i ever have).
This kind of relationship would also explain why PD seems to put heaps of time and recources into developing some new technology just to either completely undermine it or even just remove it without trace in the next installment. They have ideas, develope them, prove they either can or cant pull it off to their satisfaction, then move onto the next thing.
Anyways, I just dont know. This is all just my observations; I could be completely wrong, or this could all be common knowledge at this point.