It's great that RC2 is out already, but I think the original question still holds: What's going on? I'm not saying that it should be pushed out of the door as soon as possible, not at all -- I expect it to be a great release and I believe that my expectations will be met -- and I understand that making it a great release takes time.
But still -- 8.0-RELEASE was planned to be released almost two months ago now. Now, I'm not saying I never missed a deadline, I'm just being curious -- I don't think the developers just decided to drop a new, killer feature just because they went "Ooh, shiny -- let's do that!" But also I don't think they set the expected release date on random, like "Just give them some approximate date, it doesn't matter anyway".
So, there must be a show-stopper of some kind -- some bug creeped up and it's taken the better part of the two months to fix it, perhaps? I'm really just being curious here -- I'm wondering what the show-stopper might be. Not that it mattered anyways, but I'm just like that: curious.