There's a reason why Talad has been close to paranoid with not giving any information about the release of any new features or of the finished game itself. Because he knows breaking promises gets people down. That's an issue that has been resolved, since PS Team no longer promises anything, or admits to any actual goals in fear that they may be scowled at.
There are a thousand reasons why development is slow, though. Many players and developers have tried to access the situation, but it has stagnated pretty much where this thread finds itself.
In order for it to get even further, players should be less indignant and more informative and developers should be more keen to the general trends and strategies.
The problem is that PS team usually forgets they have a definite clientèle (which currently is people who like the community, the characters they make, the RP focus, the endless grinding, dislike paying for games) and intervenes blindly in the game. If they knew anything about it, they'd still have 100 players around the game because they wouldn't have excluded one class of players (players with weak computers) and they would welcome another one (players who don't want to beg around for 300 hours until they have a char that exploits the features they heard of), since these classes are totally compatible with the current ones and contain a vast number of new souls to tempt.
It's like Rinenud says. PS players shouldn't imagine that the finished version will be much different from this, they should just decide if they like the game and stay or not.
