I think its less about lazy developers and more about greedy executives, board members, and shareholders. They don't see a clear path to exploitive monetization tactics with this franchise without massive backlash, so they barebones the budgeting. Instead of spending the money to hire and retain adequate number of top talent, and do all the required creative to design new art work and assets we get stripped out structures with no finishing pass and tons of re-used assets. All of the work they've done to "fix" the base maps has been with BF4 assets (obviously modified for the new engine, etc.)
