Repeat after me, making MMOs is hard. Repeat after me, the last thing the world needs is another bog-standard generic fantasy MMO.
This particular project looks like it was conceptually flawed, and throwing 10x as much money at it wouldn't have made any difference. It was doomed from the word "go."
Pathfinder has the benefit of already having a rich gameworld and robust set of rules governing combat and game mechanics. I would have leveraged those as much as I could. I would have made a party-based MMO that's a mix of real-time and turn-based kind of like Fallout's VAT system. Like everyone moves and acts in real time until combat or a dicey dungeon encounter of some sort occurs, and then the game would switch to a turn-based system. It wouldn't be exactly like Pathfinder 3.5 dnd where turns are all sequential. I would have groups of characters/monsters with similar initiative rolls resolve their turns at the same time in waves, so it wouldn't get too boring with everyone waiting. I would also throw in some stuff like interrupts and fast action/destiny point type stuff to keep things interesting. Essentially I would have tried to make an MMO version of the pen and paper game.
Would it have worked? Probably not, but it would have been a damn sight more playable than this.