There seem to be a couple main complaints here: the alpha release schedule (and communication about it), and the desire to see certain features before others.
To be clear, they are under no obligation to provide us early access to these alpha builds. I understand the desire to get more frequent updates, but it’s really just looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’m thankful for the opportunity to kick the tires, regardless of how much time passes between each update.
Product development is messy. Estimating how long things will take to build is one of the hardest things about it. If we’re honest, as far as the alpha releases are concerned, they really don’t owe us more frequent updates, they don’t owe us communication, and they don’t owe us timelines. Alpha and beta releases need to be held to a different standard than typical releases. @suraj was kind enough to provide an optimistic release schedule — an estimate, not a promise — so it’s really uncool and frankly a bit astounding to see it being used against them.
Also, it’s important to remember that UI work and new capabilities (like stabilization) are completely different jobs, and are typically handled by different people. Work on stabilization should have next to no impact on the interface rewrite timeline. These are separate things, and we shouldn’t conflate the two.
Yes, we each have features we’d personally like to see come before others, but the team has to juggle business needs against user needs, in aggregate. I personally believe the new v3 UI is going to provide a better, more flexible platform for handling a wide range of improvements. They should be able to get more features built more quickly as a result, including the shiny features at the top of our own personal lists. (Remember that if there are features you want to see, they’ve provided a place for requesting them.)
I’m looking forward to seeing more issues from the v2 UI get fixed in v3, and in the meantime, I’m grateful to have access to early alpha builds, and appreciate having the ability to kick the tires on stabilization at the same time. It can be very frustrating to be on a product team and get complaints like these about early builds — so much so, that I’ve seen teams cancel their early access programs as a result. Let’s try to appreciate the early access, provide feedback on the changes they make, request features in the appropriate place, and try to avoid giving them a hard time for not giving us the communication or updates we personally want on the timeline we want them.
