MG42Maniac from FH team explains why they cant give a release date (From FH forums)

I respect their honesty a lot.

WHY WE WON'T TELL
Here is a detailed explanation of why we will not ever specify what date we are releasing, until the release date is a virtual certainty.

Any date would be a guess because we don't know how long some critical tasks are going to take. This is especially true for things like coding but is also true of even (relatively) simple things like texturing of important vehicles, since each dev works at a different speed and has varying amounts of time to give to the mod.

We cannot guarantee the availability of every team member going forward--people have school, families and jobs, which often make unexpected demands which result in a formerly productive member becoming suddenly too busy to give much time to the mod.
We are still learning about the game engine. As we discover new things about it, we sometimes find that tasks which we thought were mostly "done" actually need more work, and other things that we though might require a certain amount of time may require more time, less time, or even be impossible.

Publishing a "progress bar" would be meaningless because: It would be tantamount to giving an approximate release date, since it would be asserting "we have done "p" percentage of the work over "t" time", which would give the totally false impression that a date could be calculated by comparing elapsed time and percentage with the assumed remaining portion.
it would just be a list of models plus some arbitrarily selected features. How much time the individual features would take is unknown, and getting a bunch of models, skins and code in-game and making them all work smoothly together are very different things.

Any date we publish will therefore be totally made up and wrong, and furthermore, dishonest. The only incentive for us to invent an imaginary date would be to stop people from hassling us about the release date. Since we would just be inventing a date, we could either be really optimistic or super pessimistic. If we are super pessimistic, than everyone will get depressed and complain about that. If we are optimistic, we will probably be wrong, and than people will complain (somewhat justly) that we mislead them. So given that some people will complain, no matter what we do, we chose to truthful. Our only real choice is, "what do we want the complainers to be complaining about." We have chosen to have them complain about our being unwilling to speculate about release dates. At least they are complaining about a real thing, instead of being more justifiably peeved about a fake date which we merely pulled out of a stinky place to begin with.

You might say "why don't you make a conservative realistic date?" Well we can't because of everything I listed in the first part of the post. Calculating the amount of time needed for complex software--and even the first version FH2 easily qualifies as complex software--is an extremely difficult art, and not a science. Commercial software companies get it wrong all the time, sometimes spectacularly so. We have a lot less control over our own time and resources than any business, as we are developing this for free, in our spare time.

So, to sum up, even though we are making a huge complicated project, at a very high level of quality, and giving it away for free, to anyone that wants it, there will always be people that feel we are not doing enough for them, or not doing it right, or that we are being jerks because we are not feeding them enough details about our schedule. I don't really feel much sympathy. We have chosen to be honest about our plans and expectations, rather than trying to quiet the complainers by feeding them happy lies--lies that will eventually backfire and make people even more annoyed. Instead we try to show you regular updates, so you can see for yourselves that we are really making progress, and not just spinning our wheels.

We want the release date to arrive more badly than the most rabid fan. When we know what it is, we will tell you.