well... as a software developer, i can say, this kind of thing happens all the time. and how often do you wait in ernest for a game to come out... only to find out its been delayed for 6 months for the third time?
i think seble did take on a bit too much, i told him as much and honestly i think he gave a fair explanation. he said a lot of the value of the rewrite was giving him the opportunity to learn more and understand the sim engine better. and there is definitely a lot of truth in that - it is very hard to take over somebody else's software and run with it. and, before he could make any meaningful change, he had to up his understanding considerably.
so basically, he said that it was going to take a minimum of a few months to do anything meaningful, and once people waited that long, he didn't want to give them some token changes. i had suggested he did the rewrite with *no* changes first, then make changes, so we could get a stable platform. but he felt people were anxious for some improvement and people might only be giving him 1 chance, whether it was 3 months or 6. so, he wanted to do something meaningful.
i applaud the fact that he recognizes some change is needed. but, as i said at the time, i think what he envisioned was going to take longer than expected. and it is. but that is just the nature of the beast. i think if he was making just a modest set of changes, his release would have been out not very long ago. and at that point, people would have thought, what the hell took so long when nothing changed? well the rewrite takes a long time but that is supposed to be transparent.
also, i think everybody needs to give seble a little credit. he took everyone who applied for beta testing. he is not forcing a release out that is not ready and cramming it down our throats. he could have let it sit internally for testing, but instead, gave it to the community to beat on so he could get feedback faster. in the end, that will speed up the process, and result in a better product. so zhawks is right that beta was more of an alpha. but the bottom line is we would have just had to wait longer for the beta if we didn't do an "open alpha" so to speak. and, even though i haven't heard him say it explicitly, i thin seble's strategy demonstrates he understands there is a fairly large base of users with a good "feel" who can pick out if the game is working how it used to or not, better than seble can. after all, there is no way he could have logged half the play time of the most active users. it is a great resource, and he is using it to his advantage. so i think he deserves some credit for that. instead, he could have taken the potential release approach, kept it mostly secretive, and released something we all hate that was totally out of proportion with the rest of the game. and remember, potential was *still* a huge piece of **** until seble came in and put out his first patch. IMO, that was a huge improvement.