I couldn't agree more...

I'll mention some of the features of the new client so everyone can understand why it's taking so long:

- Coin Control!  if you want to, you can choose the inputs for your tx when you send RIC
- Payment requests - this is a whole new world: we'll have "riecoin:" URIs
- new makefiles (autotools): build with "./autogen.sh; ./configure; make"
- New receive coins workflow, with invoices

And all of these that can we applied to RIC will be applied: https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.0/README.txt
Of course the new openssl will be used, and we'll have Riecoin specific optimizations.