As to when new client will be ready for release the short answer August without factoring in Murphy's law.
We expect to rebase after Peter gets back from holiday, even if we managed to do it before he would not want the client released while away in case we did get an unexpected fork.He will need to be available during the process.
The forum kinda needs a "like" button - nice work guys it's great to see an active dev team.
I think that's most likely the quickest route to failure, dev's that lose interest or just created a pump and dump coin.
Keep it up and I'm sure there's a community of us willing to help out too (in whatever way we can)
You can use the merit option for posts.If you don't use merit up it's depleted anyway afaik.Its bitcointalk's version of the like button
There will be about 75 hours of work to be done before new client is ready for stress testing so after months we are at the final stages.Once testing is complete and things run well in beta and dangers of forking are minimised we should be good for release into the wild.