7 years in December? This game can't have been "announced" in anymore than an aspirational way in December 2011; Mount&Musket hadn't even been usurped by the Napoleonic Wars DLC until the following April. I don't know if the original BCoF team included more members than just (part of?) the NW team, but surely no more than superficial work on BCoF could have begun until after NW released, at the earliest?
I agree though that it is galling that this game has basically ground to a halt years ago, after which developer/moderator comment about the game simply dropped off a cliff. I think they pretty much admitted that on the last occasion that they deigned to communicate with us (just a reply in a thread, not something they drew attention to- in fact I can't remember if even this meagre sign of life occurred in the main forum or the donator's board); as I remember it a developer responded to the suggestion that the game had been abandoned in favour of Holdfast. He said, if I remember rightly, that there were still some people working on this game and that its slow development was nothing to do with Holdfast (I think the actual crossover of personnel is very minimal), but that the originally small team for BCoF had dwindled quite some time ago to just a few and so consequently work on the game is very, very slow. I feel sympathy for them and, if they truly are still plugging away at it earnestly, I congratulate them, but I do wonder if they have genuine hopes of still releasing the game. What I am irate about is the years of virtual silence, never a single thread made to update anyone in the slightest over the years, while they do occasionally update NW and tell us all about it...one could easily believe, looking at any posts of developers or forum admins over the past three or four years, that BCoF had never even existed, since they simply don't mention it.
EDIT: Just checked the Donator Board, and in the Developer's shack Olafson has been very frequently telling us about their testing activity. He started doing this in June or July, I hadn't noticed until now since I stopped bothering to check it long ago. If you check his posts since June/July he and a few others do give some information about who is doing what and what happens in their biweekly testing meetings, so that is to be welcomed. A shame that it has only started happening recently, and that the general forumites don't get appraised of anything, but it seems the game certainly is plodding along surely, no matter how slowly, which is a welcome contrast with the wholly pessimistic impression I previously had. I still have significant doubts of whether the game will ever be released though, and remain rather miffed that they simply don't mention it in the main forum. I think they have previously said that they don't want to bother saying anything on the main forum until they have something really substantial and impressive to show, but without having a donator status and bothering to log in and look, one would not have any reason to think the game hadn't vanished into thin air years ago.