I haven't replied here in a while because the signal-to-noise ratio is really low in here (where "noise" includes things like trash talking me and speculation on the price). If you said something addressed at me here, I probably didn't read it. PM me if it's important.

Yes, estimating the time to complete software is not my strong suit, but that is a difficult problem in any case. The fact remains that I have worked hard on this and will continue to do so. I am not aware of any other developers who have made nearly as much progress (judging by public commits) in adding zero-knowledge cryptography to cryptocurrency. As for ShadowCoin, I looked at their code briefly and did not see a single commit related to this; sure, they might be keeping all the development secret, but "talk is cheap". If you look at Github, you'll see that I did more than talk.

Anyway, I am now thinking it is better to have a series of testnets with gradually increasing Zerocoin functionality, rather than a single one with all the functionality as I originally planned. I'll set a date for the first one when I am actually code complete. You can think of these as "milestones" for completion.

As for the wild oscillations in difficulty, I am working with two other people on our IRC to get this resolved.