RailsConf and the Rails 3 alpha

It's not possible for me to attend conferences like RailsConf so I tend not to pay much attention to them.

Imagine my surprise when I read that "the core team gets ready for a Rails 3.0 alpha release at RailsConf" and then find out that said conference is scheduled to start on 4 May 2009; that is, about a week from now!

Woah. "Rails 3" was supposed to be the merger of Merb and Rails. It was supposed to be just about the closest thing to a ground-up rewrite that you could expect. It is nowhere near finished and nowhere near delivering all the things that were promised yet. Why are they even talking about alphas? Why do they feel that they always, without fail, have to "make a splash"?

I personally would rather that they work patiently and methodically towards a Rails 3 that delivers on the great potential of the merge they announced only a few months ago (December 2008), instead of hacking together a rushed, buggy, incomplete mess. People build applications on top of this thing; they depend on their livelihood for it. Can't we have some responsibility please?