How I came to be stuck...

The process I have been using for my solo effort is similar to your "all or nothing" approach:

1) Get the chords, melody and lyrics written for all the songs
2) Write and record the drums, keys, bass, and synth parts for all the songs
3) Write and record the guitar parts for all the songs.
4) Make tracking mixes
5) Write and record all the vocals for all the songs
6) Final mix and mastering

The reason that I am hoping to hear about other working patterns is that it has been more than a year since I finished step one and I am still struggling to get past step four, with not much to show for a significant investment of time and effort. In addition, it is hard to get (positive) feedback on things which are so manifestly "works in progress"; the whole experience has been much more isolating than I would have liked it to be.

I work in software, and in my professional capacity I spend many days telling people to avoid this kind of "all or nothing" project methodology (in software we call this the waterfall model). The two arguments which seem to resonate the most are:

1) If something goes wrong at any point in your project, you wind up with nothing. If you use a more incremental approach even if your project gets canceled 1/3 of the way through you still reap 1/3 of the benefits.

2) If the people who are so excited by your ideas that they have green-lighted your project have to wait (any longer than they absolutely must) to see the results they will probably forget about you/lose faith/move on to something else new and shiny.

But back to music...

I'm not sure if I can change my approach at this point: I'm far enough in to it that the only possible way out seems to be to keep moving forward or die (aka the deathmarch scenario, another great software concept).

The reason (I think) that I chose to do things in the order I did was that each step in the process (2, 3, 4) used a tool which required a significant learning curve (Reason, Line 6, ProTools), so I was able to spend more time getting familiar with the tools than if I had been sticking to one song at a time and moving from tool to tool.