First things first, it was 926 words originally. Now a little longer and in the 1000+ range you claim. </obsessive compulsive correcting>
It was more to do with how long it has previously been between betas, release candidates and finals. Sorry if that point was not as obvious as I originally thought it was.
It is such a tiny data set to be able to accurately predict when the next version is coming out, but here's my analysis:
* For Rails 1.2 there was 17 days between release candidate and actual release. There were/are no betas.
* There were 2 months between the preview release announcement for Rails 2 and the first release candidate, then another month before the release of Rails 2.
Therefore, if the past is anything to go by, there will be a couple of months between the beta and the actual release but the large part (cliche: 99%) of the work is complete.
I don't want to suggest anything too solid, a release candidate could be released tomorrow for all we know, but given the number of regressions covered in the blog post I would give it another two to four weeks before they release the RC. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
DHH recently said something along the lines of that it'd be over his dead body that it wouldn't be out by RailsConf 2010. So unless DHH is terminally ill, any time in the next 2 months I'd say.
