Time spent on new development vs support is always a concern. Please remember that you are playing a beta and although we did schedule the additions so that the game would remain playable through the milestones my goal isnt to make a test version perfect, it is to make the end version perfect.
I know there is some balance required between those goals. And I think we are pretty aggresive about releasing patches but at some point the value of adding new features is higher than tweaking old ones. Also remember that I am not a professional programmer, in fact im not a programmer at all. I taught myself to program playing with Civ4 so there will be errors and bugs that are the result of my inexperience or that I am unable to fix. In time we resolve everything, but it does take time.
So, for example, I probably won't be looking at CtD issues on 0.25 anymore. Those take hours to troubleshoot and since the codebase has changed significantly they may or may not be relevant anymore. Its also not as simple as fixing it on the old version and pasting it into the new version (code is a jumble of intertwined relationships) and working in two versions is a sure way to introduce even more issues.
But some reported issues do get looked at on the new code. Right now Im really digging into why the AI seems to be leaning so heavily on siege workshops, chariots and catapults. So I do try to clean up issues like that between versions as well. Just please dont think that its as simple as just tweaking a value (well it is probably that simple, I just have to find the right value
).
The BtS conversion was a much bigger technical challenge than I suspected. Initially I didn't plan to release 0.24 and 0.25 as "Fire" versions on BtS. But after seeing the challenge I realized I would need a lot more playtest feedback and help reporting issues than I thought so I broke the BtS conversion out into smaller pieces to get your help.
"Shadow" is the last real phase FfH2 ("Ice" is just scenarios and tweaking, no major features). The team and I are really eager to get these last features in and working. At that point the playtesting and troubleshooting becomes even more important because it reflects the final game. We are almost there.
@iamjooish: Yeah, we were working on AoI and "Fire" at the same time. Which was a challenge for me personally, Im so much happier to be able to focus on one mod at a time.