This is something that has bugged me, as well. The information that has gone out from Sherwood to the general public has been ruthlessly ridiculed at AVS, and it is hard to fault people much for that when the information has been wrong so many times. We've talked about it some on the saloon over the last year or so, but the R-972 has been public knowledge for about 35 months now and has seen over two years of delays. Even if the final product is excellent, that's going to haunt the 972. The longer the situation is drawn out, the worse it will be.

Why have there been all of those delays? Was there separate (accurate) schedule information going to business partners at the same time publicly-disclosed schedules were broken? That would mean the public information was a deception, which would be a very bad thing and profoundly stupid - lying about deadlines you know are false is a good way to alienate customers and anger dealers. It would also make me very uncomfortable if I were one of those business partners, both because of the deception and because of the potential damage it could cause in the marketplace. I have a hard time believing that Sherwood could be crazy enough to do that on even a small scale, much less one that spanned years. The alternative, though, is that the same information (presumably more detailed but still from the same master schedule) was also going to business partners, all of it based on a sincere belief by Sherwood that it was accurate. That at least is not malicious, and it lacks the insane subterfuge, but it means that Sherwood had some problems with their development process' schedule - problems that have persisted and apparently not been sufficiently accounted for within Sherwood. It also means their business partners (such as Outlaw) must make long-reaching and expensive business decisions based on well-intentioned but flawed data. That would have to classify as the stuff of business nightmares.
Excellent point.