It is a little amazing to me that despite all the time here you are still not aware of the KiCad development cycle.
If you look at the v5 thread, you can see my prediction for an Aug 2018 release for v5 was off by a week or so. This was not based on any magic insight, merely the observation that the past is often a good guide to the future. I extrapolated from the v4 release cycle.
Software is notoriously hard to predict and/or manage. 50% of projects fail to deliver at all. 80% run over time or budget. Project plans are 90% guesswork and luck. There is a great book called The Mythical Man-Month written many years ago but the advice is still sound. Few project managers have heard of it, let alone read it.
I am in progress meetings every week, it is really quite depressing watching the same mistakes being made over and over again. Project managers seem to be picked based on enthusiasm, rather than any skill or knowledge.
Anyway, software is primarily a task of organising information. We don’t have good ways to predict it, simulate it or automate it. It’s a bit like Minecraft, except there are no real world rules and infinite dimensions. Well, there are some rules, delivery always get later, never earlier. I am still pondering that one, it’s like there is a time ratchet. Unexpected events always make a slip.
I have been working in software over 30 years, still no one has any real clue how to make software development predictable and deterministic. It is still very much a craft exercise.
So I am rather sceptical that throwing money or bodies at a new version will help much. The killer is tasks that can not be overlapped and latency in those. To significantly help with that, there would need to be a full time project manager, architect and test team.
There is also the paradox that if you make you development more effective, the temptation is to use that to add more features, rather than reduce the release time. The release cycle has a lot of overhead, KiCad takes at least 6 months from feature freeze to release. So you don’t really want to do 3 months development then 6 months releasing. Adding more features means more bugs, so increases the release cycle even further.
The other thing that would help KiCad develop faster to throw out backward compatibility. With a larger team, you can afford to have multiple code modules handling different versions, KiCad does not have that luxury, there is only a single module which handles the latest version and also tries to parse all legacy features. That is a real millstone to carry round. Every new version adds a little more legacy baggage, and slows progress down further.
So my prediction for v6 is that it will be however long it took to do v5 plus a bit more. Therefore no earlier than December 2020. You read it here first!
