Since at no point you will be paying anything into this, until it's running, there can be no ironclad expectation of anything at all. But having said that, I take this stuff very seriously. People say I am too salty, is that not a good thing for someone leading a project like this?
Already only 3 days in and I have received a donation towards working on this projeect, so I expect that given a few weeks there will be more than enough funding to bring it to a full public release.
I also have a very hostile attitude towards the elitism displayed by the development team here at Steemit, they don't even release binaries for the steem server, steemd. This is not the way you get people to run your network. There will be binaries, and simple, easy to follow instructions, and the whole thing. Steemit especially neglects those who provide the ability to write applications for the platform. This will definitely not be the case while I am at the helm.
This fork is a transition towards a more advanced distributed database application system that I have planned for the next phase of development. Pretty much the fork will be fixed, the rules refined, and I will personally be seeing to it that the next generation of server back-end will be developed within the next 12 months.
You can't stay still in any industry, most certainly not IT. What I have planned is ahead of almost every operational distributed public network that now exists. It is probably more advanced than even the stuff that big corporations are doing, though I expect that they are making such systems already for private use.
Thanks for your elaborate reply, much appreciated. If it wasn't clear from my comment, I'm opting in :)