I have been a software team lead for a while now and release trains can be a lot more complicated than meets the eye. Depending on how code is managed it's fairly easy to work yourself into being totally dependent on a major feature to work relatively bug free in order to release.
Once code works it's way into an integration branch (where all changes are more or less merged together in order to test) it's very hard to take it back out. For example in this case if the diesel engine implementation still has a lot of bugs you may simply be prevented from promoting code to release until those issues are solved.
This is especially true on smaller dev teams. It can be nearly a full time job to try and manage a project in order to meet regular cadence releases, and roadblocks causing significant delay are nearly a matter of course.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of ways to solve those problems, and perhaps the dev team could work to increase release frequency - however, it is usually at the cost of speed vs quality.
Do we want a stable game that is perfectly playable in it's current state, or a more rapid release schedule at the cost of more bugs in the release version of the game? The answer probably varies from player to player.
My thoughts (read: ramblings and assumptions) are - it might be a good idea if the Wolfpack dev team was to open up the beta test branches to steam in general. Steam's beta features are quite well implemented and it would satisfy the people that want to play the cutting edge as well as those who want the most stable experience. It also eases playing the beta multiplayer experience as there is no manual forum process to "opt in" to play with your friends.
Re: sub pens - on a complex project many devs are specialized. Some may be modelers, UI engineers, implementers of mechanics, animators, etc. When hung up on a major feature you may only have one dev capable of (or specialized in) working on a specific feature. It's way too easy to have too many cooks in the kitchen when coding - so in this case it's great to have other devs working on other features.
In this case the modelers may be free because all models are complete. So now that we have free time for our modelers lets get sub pens out of the way! This is how software gets done in a timely manner almost across the board.
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers to the dev team, love the game!
P.S. I would still like more frequent releases too!
