So, the question popped up

[¥R M0dd€r]

(Pop quiz: if I publish a "final completed 0.2 public edition" tomorrow, how many of those "too busy with real life" people will suddenly find time to play with it?)

Many.

Anyway, this is not leading anywhere. So why is Ares 0.2 released yet? It was done in October. Lets look back. Ren wants Ares to be extremely stable before he release it. He would want tens of testers to hardcore test 0.2 for about two months(or more), if no bugs showed up at the bug tracker(then I mean no bug at all)(in case you have not yet understood, this is totally impossible), he would consider it stable enough to get released.
He didn't have these 50+ hardcore testers, so he and Nighthawk made news posts about wanting to recruit new testers. As we all know, few people signed up for testers, which disappointed Ren which is why he think people don't care about ares(which is false). As a result, Ares was frozen for three months.
So where is the problem? How should this be fixed?
Lower the standards. This "mega stable" 0.2 is not going to happen. Ever. First of all, you could never find 50+ hardcore testers. Second, even if you did find them, it could take a year of excessive testing. You should accept that there will be bugs in the public patch.
Then the management of this project is also a big problem. There cant be a supreme leader. There should be no "admin" or "lord"(Ren). Everyone, including the testers should make the decisions together. If example Garion, AlexB and eva-251 wanted to release 0.2 right now, and you(Ren) was the only one who resist, the patch should be released. If the release was a mistake, so what? Its not the end of the world. Fix-patches could be made.

I think, if we(at that time, I was a tester) released 0.2 in oct, and a month later made a 0.2b, we could today be done with 0.3. Pity.