Honestly, this sort of thing goes on all the time--and always has. The reason people don't hear it about it is because most of us author types are professional enough not to talk about it in public. Behind-the-scenes stuff is behind the scenes for a reason; it's just part of an ongoing process, like in any business. It's between the authors, their editors, and the licensors.
The folks at the local insurance company or auto dealership don't make all their business decisions public. Same with book publishing. I don't know where you work, but I'm guessing you don't air your business's inner workings on-line. Nor should you.
Put a bunch of tie-in editors and authors in a room and ply us with booze and we'll all have war stories about books that were approved (or shot down) at the last minute, bizarre eleventh-hour rewrites, "brilliant" ideas that were vetoed for baffling reasons, etcetera. It's kind of like that scene in JAWS where Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss compare scars. "Let me tell you about the time I had to scrap the whole outline and come up with a new plot overnight . . . "
Doesn't mean we don't get back on the boat and go chasing after another big white shark. Or that one particular shark is more dangerous than all the rest. Heck, truth be told, that's part of the fun and craziness of this racket. It can be an adrenaline rush.
Like I said, I've been doing this for twenty years and everything you're complaining about is just par for the course. (Don't get me started on the hoops I had to jump through to get my first IRON MAN book approved, way back in 1995.)
And now I really need to revise those chapters . . . again.
