Why, they can do them in parallelle. In my view, they need more hardware people, it will just take too much time if Majsta is to design all the boards, not to mention, it will drain on him. Another option of course, is that they license out the core (which I think was Gunnar's original idea) to people who want to use it on their FPGA projects.
With a stand-alone board you have to have all in features in operation at once. You can't get anything visible before everything is ready.
Now with acc cards you can add new features one by one and everyone can use them immediately.
In the end when you have all the necessary features tested and working, you can do also stand-alone board much faster.
