Compare Fighter Ops to TargetWare.
TargetWare took quite a while to get to a public release, then quite a while more to get to a debugged almost "polished" release.
Ultimately, it was too far behind "state-of-the-art" to attract more than a handful of people and progresses very slowly despite the promise of open community development.
Fighter Ops set much higher standards with apparently similar manpower assets. They can be honestly working on it as hard as they claim and still won't finish any time this decade

If they ever release it, I suspect it will be so far obsolete that no one will care. The DCS series appears to be filling in the niche Fighter Ops hoped to capture.