I've lost track of who said what...
One can almost imagine Nation sitting down and thinking well, 13
episodes,
Robin Hood in space, when was the deadline, god, last week... what
cliche's
can I rehash...
I fondly remember a Mad Magazine James Bond parody with the bad guys frantically rustling through scripts to find "a torture gimmick that ain't been done by the Man from U.N.C.L.E."
This seems to happen with a lot of shows, look at early Doctor Who: [...]
or ST:TNG Not to mention the statutory obligation to re-make "Arena."
However, from what I've heard, the editing was not so much Boucher having to rewrite the story, as him having to edit
down
the scenes which contained concepts they couldn't afford to realise (huge crowd scenes, pitched space battles etc) into something they could.