I think from a business point of view, Anthem is dead but like a white elephant, you can't just throw him into the closet and forget about it.

I believe Anthem is on life support with the working crew behind it being slowly moved to different games until they have one guy doing basic maintenance stuff.

I don't blame Ben Irvine to leaving though. He tried and he failed and it's hard to stay at Bioware after that. Who knows, his next game may be amazing though from what I heard his work on Star Wars The Old Republic also got a bad reputation.

Still, I think being Lead Producer is a hard job which goes beyond deciding if Javelins should have this or that attack, there is probably lots of more mundane, corporate-like functions he needs to perform which makes him sought after.