The A-380 is essentially a commercial project. Commercial projects don't have the luxury of long and expensive development cycles. The CEV is a government project. That means it'll be studied to death for years before the first piece of metal is cut.

Compare and contrast two aircraft development projects during the late 1980s, early 1990s, both by the same company. The commercial project was the MD-11. The government project was the C-17. Guess which one took a lot longer, cost a lot more, and had more development problems. Sure, the MD-11 was an outgrowth of the DC-10. By the same token, the C-17 was an outgrowth of the YC-15.

Government sponsored R&D, with very few exceptions* that I can think of, always takes longer and costs more than commercial R&D. Bureaucratic overhead alone drags out the timeline and/or pushes up costs substancially.

*About the only exceptions that come to mind were some projects where the bureaucracy was deliberately slashed, such as Lockheed Skunk Works projects.