I stumbled upon something which outlined what was going on with the early delays due to epilepsy testing, and I can only imagine the additional 4 teams, offline 2 player, etc were all thrown in at the last minute since there was such a delay.
But their link to a comparison video for zone mode no longer works. I'm really curious to see early Zone footage because I never really kept up with progress of the game when it was in early development. Does anyone have links online to early videos?
I found this one very early video which has a lot of graphic and detail differences, along with early ship models like the goofy Qirex design (that was thankfully scrapped): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d-AlBQFiAY
(personally, i like some of these course designs better, and the announcer voices are awesome) ...interesting note, it seems like only Qirex, Piranha, and FEISAR are in that video.