It's definitely not going to take as long as many of you think
I think the nightmare of the 7.0 development is haunting you guys. It seemed like 7.0 was in development for a couple years. But everything that was done/not done during the first major chunk of that was actually scrapped.
We started development on 7.0 from scratch in late February of '06, and we had our release in Oct '06. So that was 8 months of development time and that was a complete rewrite of everything, including the database, every bit of code in the front end scripts, all the templates and 90% of the backend.
While the 8.0 changes will be pretty big, they aren't as sweeping as what we did with 7.0. There's no way I'm throwing out any sort of hard date yet, but I'm thinking we'll be in some type of beta by summer.
