I once wrote a longer post about that:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175201&p=857545#p857545
MT most likely has a long technical debt but what they did with v7 is amazing. They’re going in a right direction. However expecting them to get a firm release date with such a project is at best foolish.
I do not know what area you work, but I can't imagine anything what can work without objectives. Also, I have not seen anything working without milestones. This is the first part of the business decision. I worked on some IT products, some leader says the objective is what we have right now, communicate that as success and the other planned features come as updates, some other have dreams about a minimum and force it even if it could break the firm (you already know some of them, they were/are very famed because of the results of their "vision")
1. Nobody says MT does bad job on development (mostly because we don't see the development decisions)
2, Nobody expects to have a specific date for the release.
3, But all MT customers deserves to see the picture and the high-level plan
We have just two opposing facts here:
1, There are devices which run on v7 only. (as my example, I bought one about a year ago)
2, The routing interface was wholly different this January, but there was a decision to change that in beta status
What does it mean? If you release a device in the middle of 2020, that is a message, you plan to release your software as production ready soon. Then you change the routing configuration interface (and probably all under) in 6 months this means you have not even reached the alpha status, you are in a planing phase. If you give out mixed messages about when it could be usable, it means you don't have any idea when it can be ready because you don't know your objective.
I believe most reasonable people would be grateful getting a milestone plan (what can be changed of course) but saying something similar as release plan is not possible with such a kind of product sounds like you have no idea how an IT project can be successful.
As my experience MT is more professional, than not having a plan, they change those based on business decisions. I asked them to share these plans with the community if they already made them dependent on the new software release with incompatible hardware.