The magazine Game Informer had an article about the closing of Free Radical and Battlefront III.
They said that it was originally planned to have 100 player online battles, but due to technical limitations, towards the end of development that number went all the way down to just 16 players, and that even the console version was having trouble with that (which doesnt make sense since SWBF2 for PS2 had 24 players per server).
So they said that they tried to implement an online AI system to make up for the lack of human players, but that faced a lot of problems which ultimately led to what we all know of as the project leaving Free Radical.
So I guess they were right about the game being a "complete mess"... 
