And then what ? release it when we meet the deadline even if it's not completely ready... or change the deadline every few months...
Far too many pieces of software are like that. I'd rather wait a few months (years ?) more, go through more beta stages than having a buggy product that was released on time. I can't remember how long we had to wait for almost all Blizzard games.
However, I must admit that they made some communication errors about this product and the release of v1.0.
I heard _panic_ had real life problems he had to deal with before coming back. Some very interesting ideas were mentionned in these forums: complete documentation and code skeleton for the modules, revision control system (who knows how many developers will work on ioFTPD in the future), unit tests, etc. I believe they are all in the pipeline and will be announced when they're ready (just my 2 cents).
We can't plan problems/downtimes so I'll live with them and make a list of bugs/requests I would like to see implemented and send it to _panic_ when he'll be back.
Also, it would be great to be able to chat with _panic_ (or the other members of the dev team, if any) from time to time. Maybe he doesn't like irc but something like a monthly bugday would be great.