I’m sad to say that my current estimate is never. But the project is still young and there is a lot of potential for things to improve.
The reason I’m pessimistic is that I’m not seeing constructive priorities. There is a core of people who are highly motivated to build something. But build what? Some people have already decided on a programming language and a database architecture, but that’s not important at this stage. What’s important at this stage is to have a sufficiently consensual goal, then to figure out what it takes to reach the first step towards this goal.
I’m pessimistic because there’s no consensual goal in sight. But maybe the goal of rebuilding Stack Exchange exactly (which I personally won’t hinder, but I have no enthusiasm for) has enough followers to achieve something usable.
I’m pessimistic because coding seems to have priority over building. There is a near-consensus to start coding even though nobody has shared any reason why we couldn’t build on what already exists.
Nonetheless, turnaround is definitely possible. The tech lead and team lead have just been chosen and some leadership can help focus efforts. Please don’t read this as “we are doomed”, that’s not what I mean at all. I mean “we need to shape up”.