Indeed I didn’t give you a precise release date because I can’t garantee you the precise date will be the good one (and we don’t know it anyway). I know it’s frustrating to have “in the future” but… at least that’s true.
When we look back at what have been done each year, we can see that a lot of things evolve in a good way so don’t worry, you will have your upgrade in the next couple of months for sure (/e/ Nougat will be deprecated in Q4 2020 so the upgrade will come before this).
Anyway I just asked to the one in charge of this in order to have updated informations and he answered that almost everything is ready for an Oreo test build. Expect it in the following weeks (again, no precise date). For the stable version on phones sold by /e/, it will of course be later (via OTA) because it will need further testing.
I think that what has been achieved is a lot for a quite little team. They are well organized and we can’t say it’s a mess. Yes it could be better, like everything I guess, but things evolve quickly in a good way and that’s why I think this project won’t die tomorrow.
This plan doesn’t impact the dev/maintainer team (see it more like a community plan), so it won’t change anything, except that the number of updated unofficial builds will be higher, and the list of requested devices will finally be listened to (yes it won’t be official builds but it’s much better than nothing).
I invite you to look at this topic, that’s precisely what will be done.