Hey neverhangover, I appreciate your feedback and I'll try to address your concerns in the best way I can.
Concerning the possible 'July release' as mentioned in one of my blog posts, we did have both dedicated servers and a very primitive version of the Venice Extension system implemented in our client.
However, at that point we were still emulating Blaze, something that limited our ability to provide our users with some of the features we wanted to include in our project.
Additionally, many other features we had planned were not even in a properly researched state, meaning that we would have to drag our users along in the closed beta in order to implement them (something we didn't want to do), and god knows how long that would've taken.
From another perspective, if we had deployed a semi-functional project for the open beta, it would've been a nightmare to manage and update, without causing greats amounts of stress for both us and our players.
Finally, the code was a mess. Nothing was organized properly, and basically everything was hacked together in order to provide basic functionality.
Admittedly, we did stop working on VU for quite a period of time, mostly due to other obligations like work and studies.
However, we've gone a long way since then.
We started looking at the development and deployment of VU in a more professional manner, which lead us to the decision of not making big compromises, so we can deliver what we believe to be a quality product.
Sure, it might be more stressful and time consuming for us, however that's a challenge we happily accepted.
(Fun fact: We are currently in the second full rewrite of VU [currently with more focus on structure and modularity for future projects], and the first full rewrite of our custom backend services)
I admit that VU was announced earlier than it should have, and that we haven't done a great job with informing our users about our progress. However, all that is already changing.
If you have any other questions and/or concerns, feel free to let us know (same applies to everyone).
And as our good friend Gabe Newell says: "Hopefully, it will have been worth the wait!".