They announced they will deliver Alpha 2 after Alpha 1. So no BETA in the coming weeks/months. We might even see Alpha 3 as well, I don't know. Things change quick as they work quite fast  .
Data needs to be secure all the time, even when the whole internet goes down for several days. That's why they're working on datachains. We NEED these before that goal is ever reached.

Routing needs to be fast and secure, that why they've implemented 'Disjoint Groups" over the last weeks. Nobody should be able to attack the network by starting thousands of nodes to target groups. That's why they invented "Node Ageing". They talked about a solution to this problem for several days with several devs. And Node Ageing was the outcome:

https://github.com/maidsafe/rfcs/blob/master/text/0045-node-ageing/0045-node-ageing.md

So these things need to be implemented before we can ever have the full SAFE Network with nodes from home an data that's secure even without being touched for years. But it won't take years to do this. They have around 12 coders at the moment and things go quite fast. Check the weekly updates to get a grip of where they are:

https://safenetforum.org/t/maidsafe-dev-update-october-18-2016-test-11/11562