Games and Patches

Is it just me or is it the trend these days for gaming companies to release their games half finished and then patch them up later when consumers inevitably discover the bugs? I recently bought 2 games to waste my time on: Neverwinter Nights 2 and Far Cry 2 respectively. The main reason for my buying these games was that I was finally able to get a decent internet connection at my place and I really wanted to be able to play online with people around the world. Imagine my dismay when upon installing each of these games, i found that I couldn't even connect with other players on-line which was the main reason I bought the games in the first place!
First, lets talk about Neverwinter Nights 2, after arriving home after a grueling day at OLA, all i wanted to do was enjoy the latest RPG that I've been longing to try ever since I've upgraded my video card. I installed the game and so far so good... the installation completed then a message box prompting me to download the patches popped up so i thought, "ok... how long could this take?" I left my computer to catch a quick nap and when i woke up 3 hours later it still was not done. So i thought well three hours probably means that it was almost done so i waited... and waited... and eventually fell asleep... the next day about 12 hours later the game was still patching itself! a total of 21 patches have been installed and 1.5 gigs of data had been downloaded and my game still wasn't running! I searched the forums to see if i could play the game on-line without the patches and what I found was that the game was so full of bugs that the game kept on crashing when played with other players on-line. So i was almost tearing my hair out in frustration. This experience was then repeated when I bought Far Cry 2. After installing the game I was relieved that I was able to immediately go play online and after the first day I felt really good about purchasing the game. On day two however, I found myself getting kicked off the game after some 20 minutes of online play and so i thought well may be the servers are just full and so i decided to play the next day. The problem still persisted however and upon searching the forums I found that a program within the game called punkbuster had been responsible for kicking out players online and that i wasn't the only one experiencing this problem. I had to wait 3 weeks from my purchase for the company to finally get around to making a patch for this problem.
So my gripe is that gaming companies are in such a rush these days to release their games that they fail to make sure that their games are all in order and bug free. This wasn't a problem with games I used to play back when a pentium 1 with 2 gigs of hard disk space was considered the ultimate gaming rig. Gaming companies these days just seem to want to get the money now and patch the game later.