Strike i'm with you in your general assumption, but extending in my point of view your metaphore:
- the road is in a private neighborood paid by the local community
- after some months of work (insthead of some weeks said by the construction company) the community is irritated and is yelling the boss of the company
-the boss of the company needs to fix it, but explains precisely the problem to clarify more the situation.

The fact that they say: "there is nothing to tell because we are working on" is like to not say that an old pipe exploded and to say nothing to the community more than "we are working on some new problems".
If someone thinks that there is no way to talk about technical problems i would simply remember that the world is not full only of children not able to understand the language of the programmer gods. It is like to say to the community "We are sorry for the late but there are problems- What kind of? - I'm sorry you would not understand."
If someone is interested in seeing how a complex developement can be described he could go to read the Xplane 10 developer blog.
Explain the problems require time for sure, but the trust is not for free and the situation is not so calm and positive now, after an year.

Strike, there is slightly different issue here I think - there is always a judgement to be made about how near you are to completion of the plan and whether it is worthwhile to go to all the hassle of reconfiguring everything.

To make that call you need to have some idea (or take a guess!) of how long either option is going to take. If you're always making the judgement that you're 'nearly there' then there never seems to be a good reason to change course.

It's only with hindsight that you realise you've spent 3 months convinced you were 'nearly there' - and there is STILL no way of knowing whether NOW you are 'nearly there' or it will take another 2 months?!?

For this reason alone I don't think we'll see them issue an interim patch. I just hope that they make the progress they need on the graphics soon enough.

I would prefer to wait and have a single patch that goes the distance in resolving the main areas of critiscm. I fear an improved GFX patch with better performance will not altogether satisfy a lot of peeps if the FM, DM, comms, AI are left unattended and WIP.

It will be a case of "yeah, it runs and looks better but .........".

You do not need to assume anything. They`ve been saying that probably in every single friday dev update thread to date.

That is your opinion and you are entitled to it. In my opinion the updates probably have been more frequent than any other game I bought. Except maybe the original IL2 in its days of glory.

The problem is that in information terms, "They're working on it" is slightly more informative than "They're still breathing", but not much more.

Haha! I agree with this whole-heartidly. Its their job to keep 'working on it', but to think that is an update is ridiculous.

Now if one of their updates was 'we are taking a few weeks off from 'working on it" then that would be an update worth mentioning, but probably not for any good reason.

I think people are reading too much into this.

They are working on it. Coding takes time, and for something like CoD, it takes a $hit load of time.

For the projects I work on I basically lock myself in a room and tell people to pi$$ off and leave me alone. My work mantra is "It will be done when it's done. If it's going to be late I will tell you and I'll explain the reasons why."

The more people poke and prod me about the project, means I have to spend more time in meetings which is less time coding.

Just leave the devs to do thier work, "It will be done when it's done".

If you want a distraction from the waiting, play RoF, Ka-50, A-10. For me I've taken up Scuba diving ... lol

So.. when one of your projects that 'will be done when its done' is going to be late, do you also recommend that your clients go to your competition for their products while they wait?

If so, how's business holdin' up?

Reminded me of this

http://i29.tinypic.com/27x020l.gif

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"