I think gui should be releases in summer. And mid next year there should be a hard fork of monero. But not sure if this is correct though.
Maybe not the best place to ask, but why does it take so much more time?
It's a matter of prioritization, really. Check out the dev roadmap on getmonero.org, and see what they've done instead.
As mentioned, there are GUIs available. I actually prefer jwinterm's light wallet.
https://forum.getmonero.org/20/general-discussion/166/lightwallet-a-lightweight-monero-gui-account-managerI really, truly, do not understand the "official" GUI thing. How many people use the official bitcoin GUI? The best I can muster, I think the GUI thing is at best a red herring or at worst something monerians tell themselves for comfort regarding the price.
If one is truly concerned about price, then the best investment of time is probably into merchant integrations. Hell, the reason monero isn't on ALL of the exchanges is because 1) the "official" binaries eat your memory and 2) in general its so different than bitcoin these exchange sharks don't want to deal with it. If there was a detailed, step-by step guide on how to accept monero deposits *and* execute withdrawals *and* the official release only used 50 MB of memory, it would pop up more places.
Ultimately it takes so much more time because its not really important, - so exactly what was said about prioritization. And as I've mentioned before, the prioritization chosen has direct effects on the security of the network. Imagine if the core team *had* continued on its work with the GUI as its #1 priority.... presumably, based on the logic of everyone that pines for a GUI, the introduction of the GUI would cause a massive surge in adoption. THis surge in adoption would then cause the blockchain to grow at a much faster rate than it already did. So now the blockchain is 10 gigs, and 5 people can run nodes....
the move of the blockchain to the database increases the security of the network by increasing node count and distribution (read = not datacenter), and as this is a financial network, this is *the* most important thing.
Focusing on the GUI is like if Ferrari spent their time focusing on the steering wheel. They don't.