Huh. I’ve heard it often enough, including from developers on their own forums when talking about how the game was coming along, updates and the always popular “The art team is a separate entity from the people working on balancing Panda Knights so, no, you don’t have to complain that these new character models mean that Panda Knight balancing isn’t happening.”
And yet another dimension to that is that, even if you’ve completely internalized that the Companion Cube is just a dumb meaningless box, you might still spend some time trying to figure out a way to get past that point without incinerating the Cube, just because the antagonist has told you that you can’t, and you want to give her the metaphorical finger.
And even once you’ve finished that level, the game still doesn’t let it go, because there’s a subtle but definite indication later on that the Cube wasn’t and couldn’t be destroyed by incineration, anyway.
Well the final balancing of the game *could *be done by an external team. Indeed sometimes it’s done at least partially by volunteers during beta.
Because balancing can be done by just tweaking various parameters and doesn’t necessarily need to be done by a developer.
But more likely, that person was just trying to say “3D modelling and balancing are implemented by different people, so can be completed in parallel” and just expressed it in a misleading way.