Great first post! and very insightful. In hind sight I'm not certain what could have been done in the development to have changed the expectations on the beta's. I really think that it wasn't the devs or Evan fault but the over zealous supporters pumping the hell out of things and creating unrealistic expectations in the beginning of beta releases. That complicated things and has caused this hyper sensitivity that we now have to live with. Lets hope for a smooth RC4 release.
I think my views are somewhat tainted by the fact that I have worked in the markets before, have witnessed release failures and also the subsequent zero tolerance response. I'm an IT man myself but in Programme Management and not related to dev so I have very little experience in these areas.
I find it hard to appreciate that you can beta release a crypto currency. If its there, people will use and abuse it regardless of the risks. For what its worth it seems that every altcoin has gone with the "lets go live and make it work later!" approach which I suppose is just the way things are. These aren't coins being developed by large teams, these are people with day jobs working on something new that hasn't been done before.
Whichever way you look at it these are exciting times and it appears that DRK is a good distance ahead of its competitors. Some people have mentioned that there will be room for more than one anon altcoin but I'm not so sure. If DRK does it first and does it right, I think it won't be long before those who value their privacy will be buying items online and in real life using DRK.
Anyway, apologies for the ramble. You have no idea how frustrating the last few months of reading this thread have been. The XC war was particularly hard to stomach.