Well I think I can give a status update:
The Inferno mods are basically done. DaBrain wants to upgrade a few things here and there but we have all the weapons and all the ships ready. Anything else is just table edits and fixing any errors that show up.
We still have issues of slowdown at some points, but I've managed to reduce those a bit. Otherwise everything runs smoothly the rest of the time. I should get some permanent staff testers in to hack away at this really.
We need an new INF Build which has to wait untill after Phreak adds our latest changes to the CVS codebase.
Missions have completely stalled. We have 8 missions of the first chapter in progress at the moment. For such a large project we only have 1 active fredder.
So technically I could release it now, but you'd get no missions with it, and no I don't plan on doing so

Sid thinks 2006 release at the current mission pace, but I'm more optimistic for a release this year. It won't be early this year though, probably a winter release, unless things change any time soon.