Glad to hear someone other than me has picked up on the Hyperion quality obsession.
I am split 50/50 about whether its a good idea, if they had done what Bplan did with MorphOS and "got it out there" regardless on PPC ....
As Janne responded to you at ann.lu, the lower layers of MorphOS were done first, and then the higher level things worked on (still in progress), so it was possible to "get it out there" early since the functional parts were ready, and the hardware available. I suppose partly because Genesi was the "outsider," there was greater motivation to create a public impact early on, whereas with the Amiga line, people are accustomed to waiting.
An early beta release hasn't been an option for Hyperion, since they've had the higher-level parts in progress longer, but are still working on the low-level things (though apparently getting close). So it has never been possible for Hyperion to "get it out there" since it only now is running -- to some extent -- on expanded Amigas, and still isn't running on AmigaOnes to speak of.
So at bottom it hasn't been "quality obsession" that has kept Hyperion from releasing a beta of AOS4 to the public. It's been the fact that there isn't a functioning beta to release (or at least hadn't been up to the point of the AOS4 World Tour) equivalent to the early MorphOS releases, and of course still isn't for the AmigaOne, as far as we know. Of course, it could very well be that Hyperion want to keep it in-house until a runs like a Swiss watch, but that's an issue separate from the fact that AOS4 still isn't complete enough to release, except just recently for expanded Amigas.
-- gary_c
