In my life I’ve never seen any product get released at the initial estimate date. Ever. Especially if it’s a software. In my work, we’re currently waiting on several very promising products that were slated to roll out in April of this year but still haven’t. And that’s completely normal and expected.
When LingQ, or anyone else hints at new releases, my response is always “That’s gonna be neat.” and I go back to working with the tools I have now. And yes I do look forward to using newer, better, shinier tools when they arrive, but the reality is, it takes a lot of tweaking and debugging to make a product releasable, so expecting it to meet any kinda deadline is just counterproductive.
And I’m sorry, but the whole idea of “transparency” when it comes to product development is kind of an odd expectation. No company is ever “transparent” when it comes to new stuff. That’s not how business works. Companies don’t OWE your upgrades. Apple doesn’t owe you a new iPhone, and they don’t have to tell you what’s gonna be in it if and when they release one. They hint, leak, announce, and roll them out as they see fit.
I was around for the LingQ 4.0 release and beta testing, which took months and months after the initial hints of it – and that was actually big a jump in usability of the site, probably more so than the 4 - 5.0 jump will be. At the time I was looking very much forward to the release, but the idea that LingQ somehow owed me a release date and “transparency” about it has never crossed my mind.