I'm sure there are target dates (the break notwithstanding, of course). He chooses not to share them with us, because then people will say stuff like "You promised it out in June! It's not out! You suck!"
Inherently artistic projects are harder to scope than technical projects, because you have to deal with things like artist's block in addition to technical issues like mis-estimating render times.
And that's kind of the crux of the problem.
If all of these projects were purely "labors of love," then the developers would be beholden to no one but themselves. "It's done when it's done" would be the last word and there really would be no gainsaying them.
But as is always the case when money starts changing hands, "commercialization" complicates things.
People argue this back and forth on every game that has "hiccups" in its process, and it basically boils down to this: the moment you start throwing money into the equation, then the process sort of stops being "purely artistic" and starts falling into that gray area of "commercial software development."
We can boo-hoo all we like about the evils of AAA game development and the perils of getting in bed with the likes of EA and UbiSoft and all of those others, but there's a reason why things are run the way they are. It's not really sustainable to just turn a team loose, give them an indefinite amount of money and an indefinite amount of time and hope they produce. Someone, somewhere has to crack the whip.
With no one to crack the whip on these indie developers - with no one holding the reins - it's entirely possible that nothing at all gets done. Or something does get done, but not in any "reasonable" amount of time. (Insert thousands of posts back and forth debating what constitutes "reasonable.") The point still stands that there are always hardliners who insist that even though there's now money in the equation, that shouldn't change the nature of the beast. That everyone who isn't actually
working on the thing should be hands-off and should have no say in how or why things are done because of "artistic integrity" or this or that, and because "this is not a commercial product."
That may be. But again, going back to the idea that if you take X amount of people with varying amounts of motivation, give them no incentive (either negative or otherwise) to finish something and leave it entirely up to them to finish the work or not... you stand a very real chance of not getting a finished product. And while some people complain simply because they live to do nothing but complain, others just don't want to see promising projects die because of lackadaisical dev studios.