I read what the dev is writing but I tend to agree with AdvancedFollower's assessment. I'm an engineer working for a company developing both hardware and Software and if I've learned one thing over the years, that is if you leave the timeline for any commercial project in the hands of the engineers you will be waiting a long time.
It depends on the engineers and what you have asked them to do.
I always found that the timeline for my projects were impacted more by management having crazy ideas for how things should be implemented.
If I was developing the network driver for this I'd start with the easiest way, even if it meant using a "bloated linux driver" and it only ran at 100mb/s etc. If people want to wait for a gigabit driver before purchasing then that is their choice & I would make it clear that a better driver was still in development but may never happen.
Once the hardware is out there then someone else might even develop a better network driver.
