It feels odd to be arguing this side instead, but I think the Bravely Default/Setsuna situation makes more sense if you zoom in than if you sit back at the 40,000 foot corporate level.
Bravely Default
Tomoya Asano was the producer of the following games:
Final Fantasy III (DS)
Final Fantasy IV (DS)
Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light
Bravely Default
Bravely Default: Praying Brague
Bravely Second
If we look at his career path, he made a name for himself remaking old Final Fantasy games, and then parlayed this into being able to make a new IP. Bravely Default originally leaked as the sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, and you can still see many elements from that in the game, but they ultimately decided to make it a new IP instead.
If we look at Wikipedia's summary of the game's development, we can see it went through a lot of revision as well:
Even though the game has been called a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light,[3] Bravely Default was designed as a new IP heavily inspired by both the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises. Its title stemmed from its two core battle options.[16] Kensuke Nakahara, the game's designer, said that the project started as "an incredibly standard RPG, a bit like [Final Fantasy III] or [Final Fantasy V], but the concern was whether this was the best thing for a new IP like this. With this gameplay system, I felt like it really had the chance to turn the whole game around, so I was incredibly excited about it."[16] Naotaka Hayashi was the scenario writer for Bravely Default, having previously been the scenario writer for Steins;Gate, and developed the plot and the characters.[4] During development, Asano asked Hayashi to increase the age of the characters, and make sure that all the characters were appealing, whether good or bad. Hayashi explained in an interview that the title Bravely Default means "have courage and renounce the promises and responsibilities that are expected of you".[4] The games producer Tomoya Asano was attempting to make a game with "appealing and likeable characters and a scenario that surprised players", and after seeing Steins;Gate, asked Hayashi's employer, 5pb., if he could work on the project.[4] Asano designed the Final Fantasy-style story so players would have little trouble entering, while the story-telling and gameplay was heavily influenced by western video games and television series, with Asano seeing it as a "Japanese RPG with American content thrown in."[22]
The game was originally designed as an action RPG, but later in the development, the development team switched to a traditional RPG formula.[23] The game's developers also decided to cater for the core Japanese RPG fanbase, as they did not believe the game viable for Western release at the time.[24] During the latest stages of the game's development, the team had to make several last-minute tweaks and changes to ensure the game delivered the best possible performance.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravely_Default#Development
If we step back a bit, the first three games he produced were all made by Matrix, but for Bravely Default, he tried to get a bunch of new people Square Enix hadn't really worked with before to make the game and externally direct it since Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light didn't turn out very well quality wise and didn't sell especially well either. Given his prior success, Square Enix was supportive in letting him hire who he wanted, while Matrix was moved on to making iOS remakes of Final Fantasy games instead.
However, throughout the game's development, most of the pushing and promotion for the series was coming out of Asano. There was the initial reveal where a bunch of Square Enix staff sat down and talked up how this was the next RPG series from the company that brought you Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, but the passion was being driven out of Asano having ambitions to produce his own games and really get it right.
At the time, Square Enix was much more focused on big hits however, and Bravely Default wasn't exactly moving as many copies as Final Fantasy III or Final Fantasy IV, so I suspect they had less interest in pouring a lot of money into the sequel, especially since there was a long delay before they greenlit it. They did greenlight around 3 months before the first Western release however, so they presumably decided on a budget they were willing to work with based on how it did in Japan, and the end result was Bravely Second. Square Enix is not known for being super generous with their budgets at this point, especially for smaller projects, and we even had Koei Tecmo publicly expressing they had worries about the amount of time and resources they had to get Dragon Quest Heroes done, so I don't think they were singling this game out in any way for lesser support so much as that just being the corporate direction they're operating under.
Prior to Bravely Second launching, Asano noted that if the game sold really well, he would immediately submit a proposal for the next game. The game came out to pretty ho-hum results, and Asano followed up in an interview saying they were interested in continuing the series, but currently he was sitting and talking with the senior staff over at Silicon about whether they wanted to make another Bravely sequel or a New IP. Now, let's boil this down for a second. The direct implication here is that Square Enix is still publishing an Asano produced, Silicon Studio directed and developed game. It also implies that Asano and the team are getting to decide their next move as opposed to being ordered to do anything in particular. To me, the situation comes off as as a case of Asano going "Well, Bravely Second had a performance where we could go either way, so let's sit down and ask ourselves what we really feel we should be doing next." as opposed to a shadowy council of Square Enix executives yelling "YOU SHALL FAIL!!! MWUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" while tossing lightning bolts at him. Maybe they'll decide to make another Bravely game, maybe they'll decide to make a different throw back IP, or maybe they'll even go back to their Action RPG idea, but I don't get a sense of animosity or a cloud of failure hanging over the team so much as a group with a lot of autonomy deciding between two forks in the road.
Project Setsuna
This game appears to be Square Enix's CEO's current pet project, but also looks one of their lowest (if not the lowest) budget non-mobile projects overall.
The genesis of this project was that Square Enix's CEO wanted a group of developers who were fans of Square Enix's older games to go about developing an "authentic (classic) JRPG" without the burden of the Square Enix brand (and thus Square Enix's modern stylistic choices) hovering over them. As such, he set up the studio as a different corporate entity (it's a subsidiary of Square Enix Holdings instead of Square Enix Japan), put Atsushi Hashimoto in as the director (I'll go into the relevance of this in a bit), and asked him to hire a bunch of people from both within and especially outside of the company to make the game.
Atsushi Hashimoto was an interesting choice of directors because he was a planner on the SaGa 2 remake for DS, had left to join Sora to make Kid Icarus, and came back to Square Enix to direct Final Fantasy Explorers. Not only is rejoining your old company unusual in Japan, but this was actually a notable part of why he was chosen to lead this project. Matsuda felt that as someone who had been outside Square Enix and came back, he would be someone well fit to running a studio that was both part of Square Enix and not part of Square Enix. Side Note: Don't hold your breath for Final Fantasy Explorers 2.
While Matsuda had various ideas for what he wanted to see in the game, and the team requested that he elaborate on what he wanted, he refused to share them as he didn't want to influence the direction of the game and instead have it actually be the result of his vision of a new classic style JRPG made by people who were fans of Square Enix's old work.
Now, what sticks out here is that - as I noted at the start - this game actually looks incredibly cheap. On paper, this is unusual, given that at E3 2015 every game was shown by the staff that worked on the game except for Project Setsuna, which was their show closing announcement done by Matsuda himself. Given he participated in a lot of the initial interviews for the game and it's obviously a very important project to him, you wouldn't expect it to be something that seems so marginalized from a resources perspective.
However, and I could be wrong here, but a lens under which this makes more sense is this being a downloadable title overseas, and that being the primary market for the game. In Japan, the downloadable space - while improving - isn't especially healthy, so I suspect they want to do a Bravely Default: For The Sequel type scenario where they release it in Japan to whatever audience is interested, and then take feedback from them to try and improve the game for the Western release. Despite being unveiled at E3 with a lengthy speech, the project has never really been officiated for the West nor even had an official title translation, so I suspect they want to go through this whole process carefully and not introduce the game until they have the improved version to show.
In general, I think this game has no impact on Bravely Default nor any impact upon what Asano is doing. The core difference here is that Asano is a very long time Square Enix producer with significant autonomy over what he does, while Atsushi Hashimoto is a relatively new director who is helming the CEO's pet project, so the corporate focus is bit different.
