I personally believe the game was developed primarily in mind with supporting the television show and the merchandise that comes with it, when looking at the list of people attached at Big Red Button... They mostly come from developing cheap licensed titles.
Designing a Sonic game without speed makes this failure all the more appearent when you're playing the normal battle sections and then switch over to the mech speed sections which are also still pretty slow... Sonic Adventure Sonic is faster than this, let alone Adventure 2, Heroes etc game wasn't designed with speed in mind.