Yeah, I kind of feel the same. It took a really long time until we had a playable gameplay loop from start to finish, largely due to the organizational effort of getting everything together from the programming team. That made it tricky to really develop the gameplay into something more unique and varied, or to make the tutorial we wanted to make (at least we managed to make the tutorial interactive but that was done in a few hours on the last day).
Believe me, there was just as much effort to get the game loop going as there was for making assets but it was tough to bring everything together and the NPC AI kept acting up well into day 2, making it basically unplayable for a really long time. I suppose this is an interesting learning out of this: With art, it's easier for people to kind of work side by side on assets whereas code is more interconnected and it can be tough to bring it together with so many people working in different places and timezones, handing stuff over to each other and having to connect things into one gameplay loop. From a project management perspective, code is also harder to get an overview on since you can't just look at a script and tell at a glance how well it's going.
Overall, I'm really quite happy with how it ended up but yeah especially early on there were certainly some major challenges on the tech-side that held us back.