I just finally found out from one of my inside sources at Sega why AP is delayed for 7 months. It's a good reason, too: I'm glad they're doing it.
You see, when Sega did some QA playtesting recently using normal gamers under NDA, they discovered an alarming fact: the game had a distinct lack of crates. So much so that some gamers were playing through the entire game without ever once having met a crate! The gamers were so disturbed by this that some became depressed for a week after playing. Furthermore, those crates they did meet were usually stereotyped as villains or dim-witted thugs. Clearly, Sega were affronted by this situation, and rightly so, so they deemed to rectify it.
So here's to a 2010 release of AP full of crates with complex, deep personae.