Most of the time was not programming or building the project but R&D and looking for funding. It was only after their crowdfund in 2014 that they could form a real team to build this thing. And only in 2015 that they decided to move from over 500K lines of code in C++ to the Rust programming language using a new architecture.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/maidsafecoin/

You say people lost faith in the project well.... they sold their MAID-tokens in 2014 for around 0.9 cent (usd) per maid. Currently they're around 70 cent which is 77 times more. They have a marketcap of 320 million usd right now so I guess it's fair to say that there's enough faith in the project. MaidSafe is opening an office today in India. They already have around 20 people working for them from all over the globe. lot of great things to come but it takes time. The development of Windows took over 6 years with way more programmers and funding. MaidSafe will surprise a lot of people when they reach beta. If you think that's taking too long now..... Feel free to follow one of the hundreds of blockchain projects out there.