The Ardor roadmap says it will be launched in the third quarter of 2017. Is that for certain, or might it be launched sooner if the coding and beta testing gets completed faster than expected? If the devs complete the product early there's no reason to wait for months before launching it.
NXT devs are usually pretty accurate with ETAs. When they say it's Q3 2017 - it'll be released at that time and will be safe to use after substantial testing. It's no toy software, remember.
Why don't they do more promotion on bitcointalk? Perhaps a signiture campaign for a few ARDOR, etc.