Their inability to program for the PS3, no offense to them, but it's the truth. You look at the people who published those kinda games and it's dug in console developers, who have had a large amount of experience pushing consoles to their limit even in the early stages.

CCP has pretty much only exclusively programmed on PC (Dust excluded) and as such they just don't know how to do it.
However with PS4 it will be a lot easier to repurpose legion, after it has been beta tested and deemed ready to go.

Well you see this is thing though, assuming Legion is produced using U4 there are very few real differences in programming the consoles by comparison to the PC.

Bungie have X box experience, that's more than the developers of DUST had by a long shot.

The only reason they are developing Legion on PC first is because

1) You can patch self published games when you feel like it, so if there is a bug in the client code yoh don't have to wait till the next patch window to fix it. An example would 1.4 a few days after release a mysterious sub version was released, thks probably cost CCP a lot of money to distribute this patch.

2) Patches cost money, the problem with a persistent game is that especially at the beginning there are a lot of things forever changing, moving about etc, if you are charged for each patch you make doing what CCP did with a monthly patch becomes very expensive

3) Optimization is not a primary concern, if you are developing on PC at least at the beginning you rarely need to worry about system loads, provided you leave yourself enough 'room to grow' optimization only needs to happen when you 'run out space'.

4) In house testing is easier, now instead of taking the code, loading onto a console and testing from their, it is possible to properly field test directly from the computer it was developed on, making things like glitches much easier to solve.

5) Test Servers

However like I said the changes required for a PC game developed on U4 to become a PS4 game developed on U4, are probably more tedious than they are difficult, there would be no reason for a finished project legion not to come to PS4.

No, if 1 person can code around a limitation there is no reason why with enough effort everyone else can as well. Therein if 1 person bypasses a constraint that constraint is no longer a constraint.

The PS3 is hardly a 'very limited' machine, at least in terms of hardware. The problem is the Software Architecture made it very difficult to extract the maximum power from the system.

As for MAG code being shortcutted, if MAG shortcutted it, there is no reason why DUST couldn't do the same. In terms of DUST it is limited more by the developers lack of familiarity with the system, than the physical limitations of the hardware.

I'm gonna disagree with you there, like I said the underlying software architecture made it difficult to get maximum power from the hardware, but I have first hand experienced the power the PS3 hardware still possess.

However if you want to look at age, or more specifically aging, the PS3 is one of the longest running iterations of an electronic product in existence. When it was released it broke the standard power curve of being exponentially better than its predecessor, it practically knocked the PS2 out of the park.

Also I'd like you try and run The Last of Us on a 360, it wouldn't cope, yet the PS3 takes it in its, stride.

Pretty much, it's not that's limited, the Apollo Landing Craft was a limited computer.
It's more that is outclassed.

Some vehicles still run very well, sometimes even better on a carboretuer than fuel injection.
But as vehicles get faster, you get diminishing returns, not because it's limited, but because it is outdated.

When you talk about computers, very few are limited in their potential nowadays. As for my statement concerning The Last of Us, considering the 2 consoles were released roughly the same time with similar technology, the fact it still has more juice than an Xbox 360 is an ode to it's 'limited' hardware