To be clear on what Morwen is saying - the events in the Incursion leadup were pretty much pre-scripted once Sansha was decided on as the Incursion faction; so, CONCORD HAD to be overcome by Sansha; Sansha HAD to make off with large portions of planetary populations; Sansha HAD to extract core samples from the Apocrypha-event planets, etc etc. The events team at the time did a fairly good job of rolling with various things players threw back at them - see: Graviton wormhole "jamming" and the whole crashing-a-freighter-into-a-wormhole thing - but ultimately the entire Incursion leadup events demanded that Sansha be placed in a position to strike anywhere in the cluster and overcome most faction navy defenses, in order that the incursions be able to be marketed as a threat to capsuleers. I don't think CCP was ever shy about saying this, even as they strove to include player ideas in the arc.
The Uprising events, by contrast, have been marketed as "Come see stuff blow up! Or have a part in the storyline! By making stuff blow up!" The marketing aspect of this is pretty open-ended, although things started sliding downhill in that respect (which has been discussed to death here and I won't go into further). Point is, it was not marketed from the start explicitly as "X event WILL happen by the end of the story chain."