Up to date always changes and that means it will never reach up to date since it always changes. You would all be trying to improve the models over and over again but would never release because each time you improve the models to be so called up to date, what would be up to date would be considered to have changed and then the release would be delayed again to try to make it up to date again and the cycle would continue forever and never be released if you are all focused on having the best up to date look and just don't release it the way it is and make a patch for it later. Mobius and ShadowGorrath have a point and I agree with that.
Eh, I don't really agree with that. Freespace isn't progressing at leaps and bounds. Simply there's retail-quality Freespace, and there's HTL-quality freespace. Their models sound like they're at retail quality, they want them HTL. Remember this project has been going for years, it's been around as long as I can remember and that's a fairly long time. It's not unreasonable for them to want to update their models to the newest quality or nearly so.
And would releasing it now be a problem? I'm sure it would with some players. How many people post threads in modding saying "oh, anyone have some new shivans? or whatever" and someone says "oh, yeah, look at these! (ie Inferno R1)" to which people reply "no, those things are old and crap. Anyone have anything HTL??". This mod has been around for ages, I'm sure a few of their models are looking a little old.
So-called feature creep can be a problem. But only if people let it become one. And I doubt that anyone, after having updated all of thier models to a new standard, will then choose to go and update all of them all over again. I sure wouldn't, I'd say "**** it, good enough" and release the bugger.