Do the people who write the underlying engines/frameworks (I know little of game development) have it better than those assigned to particular titles?

a large majority of those ship with a AAAish title (I guess in part eating your own dogfood) - think Lawrence World or Basecamp for the Web framework discussion... We're talking games like Quake X, Unreal (Tournament) Y, etc

So they probably hit the same kind of crunch as well.

To play devil's advocate, when you invest $20m-$100m in a game you often can't/won't take any risks.