Haven't looked into the code, but the bugs i've found and how they've affected the game and how i was sometimes able to solve them through gameplay, you're statement sounds accurate.Yeah I think a small modification of Hanlon's razor is applicable here.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by laziness."
As the delays make us spent more time, destroy hardware (computer mice), and keep us from finding our desired content quickly, they could be attributed to malice. But I stand with laziness.
But let's get back to discussing the game. The worst part for me is the code. I thought about trying to make a cheat addon (to quickly access paths etc.), but I looked over the files and quickly decided not to. It is chaos and I assume quite a lot of bugs in the game stem from the fact that the developer is losing his overview every now and then and is using a lot of copy+paste from one branch for a new branch and forgets to change variable names and similar stuff.