I've been followink Nokia for 7 years now and i know as a fact that flagships have an 18 month time range from conception till launch. So these definetely started life before the aquisition, but i also see that MS did have some imput in the final product and not the good kind. Following all the news about closed factories vand thousands of people fired, including people from the main Finland HQ, and also seeing these leaks i can only come up with one conclusion. MS is trying to cut costs on the manufacturing side. This mean they won't risk anymore extravagant design features that need expensive production techniques and facilities. They removed the 2.5d curved glass, they are removing the color options( Rubino said the blue is only for the Cityman prototype and we won't see it in stores).
I think Ms simply wants to milk what they already got from Nokia with minimal further investments in new tech. Basically do as much as posible with as little money and resources as possible cause they know trhat so far making phones in the wp ecosystem hasn't been a lucrative business for anyone.
I also think that if Nokia would have still been involved and in control they would have delivered something special again. Remember that before the aquisition Nokia was developing Pelican senors for their next flagship, they were developing high fidelity 3d maps with Here using the lydar, there were rumours they were developing a fitness oriented wearable and something related to VR. And judging from the 920 launch when they had a lot of stuff to compliment the phone, i thing this would have been the case now too. Fast forward to the present and Nokia proper released an awsome VR camera, they hired engineers to work on a wearable that combines fitness tracking with next gen location services. The camera r&d stuff was left in the Technologies division, cause that's were it was being developed along with next gen graphine applications.
Ms is left instead with a basic phone, that only features the stuff they've been working on, like Continuum an d stuff Nokia already developed and put in their flagships. Imagine this phone with curved glass, some clever back design, truly next generation camera, a whole array of accesories, a cool wearable,,improved mapping and some cool phone feature that takes advantage of that, some VR features(nobody does VR for windowsphone, but everyone does for android, so something like this would have been welcomed and necessary to keep up with the competition) plus Continuum from MS with the universal apps and w10 tie in. It would have been imense.
Oh and i disagree about the thikness arguments, cause HTC and LG both have 9.8 mm flagships. But they can definetely do better. I have one fear though, that they are crippling their own flagships to apease the other oems in hoping they will bring theire A game to windows. But i don't think it will work. Anyways this whole transition was a failure until now, it was all one dissapointment after the other