Correct me if I'm wrong, but It's my understanding the 15 people point was during the last few months of Cryptic ownership. NCSoft had no control of Cryptic staffing or the staff allocation, and precisely the lack of resources was one of the strong reasons for NCSoft to believe there was a severe conflict of interests going on with the simultaneous development of another super hero MMO.
I don't think Cryptic would have ever canceled the game, but they would have likely kept it running on an even smaller team in the long run (had they ever have a choice to keep the title for themselves, I think NCSoft's proposition was "you[cryptic] sell it[coh] to us[ncsoft] or we jointly cancel it, you ain't buying it for yourself.")
After the release of CoV, there was an odd relationship between NCSoft and Cryptic. NCSoft and Cryptic were co-owners... the exact split is unknown (50/50, 60/40, etc) but we do know a few things about that time.
1) there was split ownership and split revenue. This is unusual, as usually the publisher is the owner and the studio is just paid for the development (plus bonuses, if certain sales are met)
2) As is normal in most of these, the Publisher pays the studio for additional (after-launch) development. The publisher also decides how much to invest in after-launch development.
3) That extra investment didn't change the ownership split. That meant that even if NCSoft put in twice its original investment into CoH continued-development, it still owned the same % of the game that it did previously.
4) That raised some points of contention.
NCSoft's continued-development budget had the potential to sustain or increase the value of the core product, but NCSoft didn't get an increased share of the product to match its increased development (or, if it did, the metric used didn't seem proportionate.) That made them reluctant to invest too much in to it. Cryptic saw this as fair, as all this was known when they sold NCSoft their share and NCSoft got a larger share for their investment because of it. If NCSoft came back now to renegotiate, it'd feel like cheating.
So, that's where things stood- NCSoft paying Cryptic the bare minimum to sustain the game, and the dev team shrinking down to its low point.
When Cryptic's Marvel MMO fell through, Cryptic approached NCSoft about the idea of turning what they were working on into CoH2, with much the same relationship as previously (NCSoft gets partial ownership for their share of the investment, Cryptic gets it). I don't know how big that effort was because not only was NCSoft unhappy with their "split ownership" part, Cryptic was growing disillusioned with the level of effort that their "publisher" put into... well... publishing.
Since both parties were becoming disillusioned with what the other was contributing to the relationship, it isn't surprising they agreed to divorce. Each got what they thought they wanted.
- NCsoft got out of its unhappy bind by buying CoH, therefore seeing 100% of the results of its investment, and therefore feeling confident in investing more into it.
- Cryptic got the money they needed to finish their product, brand it, launch it themselves (how hard could "publishing" be? NCSoft hardly did anything...) and pay for the launch of a few other projects.
All that's why I'd look more at NCSoft's willingness to buy and invest in CoH after the separation more than its low dev count prior to that for an accurate metric on how they saw the game doing. Its pretty clear that after the divorce, NCSoft was quite willing to pump money into the product, so they had some belief that the game still had legs to it.... or enough legs to be its toehold in the western market after the TabulaRasa embarrassment as they developed a new strategy.
