Well snoop I would imagine that as regards the technical team they from long experience will have developed a good feel for how long specific tasks take given no major problems. When it comes to dependancy on outside bodies and 3rd parties to fixMS the estimate gets harder, if we assume that there are multiple partners the complexity of the estimate increases.

They have my sympathy. Its too easy to be critical, I for one work better under pressure but not so if hounded, how would you like to be treated in such an intricately balanced project?