I started to hate this company during the beta but mostly because of the dumb producer nicknamed Champion. Now he is gone and CCP team has demonstrated some value even if I still dislike the game.

In this case the development is slow because it’s a complex project and they don’t have all the resources they need. Eve is a strong reality even if still a niche product. They have a solid and quite stable playerbase in the range of 40-50k subscribers.

The last big patch (Castor) has been pushed live on December, last year, and the next (Shiva) was espected for June. Obviously the news is that this patch has been delayed, around October and probably it will slip near December, matching a yearly schedule.

Well, this is surely slow. At least they have been busy to keep the server alive to support 8k players logged at the same time and more. Now they have hired 10 more peoples and decided to delay the next patch, instead of releasing it sooner with less features.

And to be honest these features sound quite impressive and interesting:
http://articles.filefront.com/46

Now we have to see if they are able to deliver all that, even after the delay.