I would completely agree that the Bitcoin core dev team likely do have more structure and rigorousness applied, but that's a project (worth multiple billions) that has had ~5 years to get to this point - I believe a startup phase looks different but that's just my view.
Actually, no: Satoshi released a complete version of a client, and Bitcoin developers were always reluctant to change things which can affect consensus. Almost no features were added to the protocol in these 5 years. If anything, many features were disabled.
I actually didn't know Satoshi released a complete client along with the white paper - I thought (assumed) that came later. I wasn't around for the beginning of the cryptocurrency revolution sadly!