Honestly, I'd be pulling a figure out of my arse if I tried to give you a release date. I can't give timescales for other members of the team to complete their parts.
With respect to my slice of the development pie; I'll probably have the entirety of the writing accomplished within the week. That's the best I can offer you, I'm afraid.
I'm not going to bust your balls here, but this is one of those points that I think people (on both sides of this argument) keep missing amidst all the vitriol and such.
If you're a project leader and the various components of your team are stuck behind bottlenecks because they don't have the materials they need to work with (like, say, the storyboard people didn't get their stuff done on time so now the artists can't do their thing and the writers can't do theirs) then that's
bad project management.
And someone can be bad at managing the flow of a project - someone can be bad at ensuring that disparate elements of a team work together effectively and efficiently - independent of whatever other skills/talents they may have.
People defend ICSTOR by saying he produces pretty images. Or they like the characters he's come up with or this or that. Ok. That's fair. But I think it's just as fair to say that he doesn't do a particularly good job of coordinating the people he has working with/for him.
I know everyone rolls their eyes at the concept of "managers." People detest their supervisors because they always seem to be "out of touch" with what the common working man has to deal with. Or, say, you hear a story about a movie being made and there's just so much corporate interference. Damn those suits for not letting the director do what he wants with his movie? Curse them for telling the guys in the writing room on a TV show that they can't do X or Y or Z. But the simple fact of the matter is that 9 times out of 10, without those guys, you could have the most talented writer, the most talented actors, the most talented director, all collaborating on a project, and you'd still get squat without someone to "produce" it. (Hence why the producer role in film/TV is such a big deal.) It's their job to keep everyone on task, keep everyone actively working, and give them the tools they need to continue working.
In addition to being the primary creator behind the dialogue/story and art, ICSTOR's role is to make sure everyone is working together, that no part of the production process is getting bottlenecked. And he's not doing the best job of that. This is not to say that he's a terrible human being and that this "crime" is punishable by death. Of course not. But it also does no one any good to refuse to acknowledge that
something in the "assembly line" isn't quite up to snuff. And it bugs me that there are people (myself among them) who are trying to point this out until we're blue in the face, and the overweening response to such sentiment is a dismissive "You can't do better, so shush."
megalul:
