We are working really hard on finishing many aspects of the game right now.
I would say we hit the same problems as Taleworlds has with Mount & blade 2; You have many guys working on many aspects independently, but actually putting it together and making a complete game is a big feat.
Constant updating underlying engine, changing concepts or finding better ways to do things, and having very, very high goals whilst having a quite small team makes development of this game quite hard, harder than we and others expected.
We shifted our focus at this point to actually finishing the game, making sure core concepts and gameplay are perfect and adding more and more of the other finished parts to the game.
Release date? hard to say.. We are pressing hard for some kind of beta this year.
I would say that we are bad at communicating with the community, for a developer it's not easy to always tell people what you are working on, and how far you are, game development is not always visible to the outside world or understandable.
Rather than trying to make it consumable we would focus on actually making something for the game.
Though we will try to remedy this, first of all there will be a big blog post outlining what was made and happened in the last year, and what the future will bring coming soon to you.. and from then on a more open development will be shown.
I know NW is dying, and has been for some time, then again it is still the most played multiplayer game in the Warband engine, outclassing any mod, and even native or the newer released viking conquest. I would call that a great success for a game so old, and graphically so low.
IF you have any questions about specific BCOF things you can always hit me a PM, or write me on steam. I'm quite lax on showing things if you wont throw it everywhere on YouTube..
The reason we are not allowing alpha testers to publish things is that things are not always pretty right now, or don't work correctly so it could scare away people that want a polished game. It will change soon however.