The Initiative was a brand new studio built from the ground up, to make a game with a totally new concept. No reusing old game assets or storylines.
They had a goal of having a boutique studio, made up of all the most talented devs from studios in that highly talented area.
They soon found out that they had too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and Gallagher had to pull rank and regain control of what the game was going to be.
Sort of, although more specifically (although I don't see this actually stated in the 2018 E3 announcement or
accompanying press statement) The Initiative was an incubator group of sorts. They had top-tier talent assembled there to "initiate" projects, with bold visions and breakthrough ideas on a grand scale... and then, they would go find some secondary studio to
actually build the thing co-develop the project with them.
It's unclear what kind of timeline The Initiative was supposed to be under (you'd think a seeder studio like this would five years later have a half-dozen projects in the works like this rather than one big thing here, which is the case as far as we know,) or how another publisher's very-busy studio became the first choice for the partner studio (Galagher's connection makes some sense, but still, Certain Affinity would be a more fitting partner than CD in the middle of tying up Avengers and juggling the Tomb Raider franchise for their boss and not having made a FPS since Project Snowblind...), or what did and did not work out with this new type of studio-over-studios model. By all (unofficial) accounts so far, the project has not completely gone completely to plan.
Shit happens in creative product production, so it's not for the worst of fates that a good studio is working on a desirable brand for a lucrative publisher, whatever behind-the-scenes issues there have been; the wait and the rumors suck, but we might in the end get a great Perfect Dark out of this at some point. Or, not. Either way, I don't really see how The Initiative can survive afterwards. It's an experiment that has not yet proven any advantages for the process of making games.