Release tomorrow?
soon, maybe in two months
two years after they find a way to reduce gigantic nem blockchain size
The main problems with blockchain tech are many and bloat is one but lets look closer.
1. Speed - NEM is already much faster then Bitcoin and the blocks come at a much more consistent rate. In the future NEM can even get faster.
2. Blockchain bloat - no crytpo has addressed this but there are some ideas floating around.
3. Ease of use - NEM is already easier than most coins in its beta and as more clients/apps come to market, it will be easier. To this end the NEM NCC is already open source.
4. Adaptibility - while Bitcoin is quite rigid in its code, you'll find that future apps and third party designs will find lots of usefulness in NEM. In fact, there is already a 65 page API guide explaining it in detail. About the only the I know that might be more flexible is Ethereum, which of course was designed with that one thing as its focus.
5. Safety - NEM devs are committed to security, that's why NEMS on launch will have user wallets and multisig. The other 2.0's don't have either as far as I'm away.
There's more, but you can see that a lot of thought is being put into this.