What kind of timeframe can we expect for R2 at this point?
Days/months/years? I have no idea what kind of time it takes to complete a mod of this magnitude and there's an overwhelming amount of posts in these boards. (just joined a couple of days ago)
Well, R1 was in development for 18 months, which was good time all in all. That timespan included a lot of hurfing and blurfing about that we won't have to do on R2, and most of the team didn't even show up until towards the end. We also had to help identify and fix a few SCP bugs.
On the other hand, R2 is significantly more complex than R1 in terms of its missions. It's been about 5-6 months since R1 came out and we're closing in on 1/3rd 'done' with R2 mission-wise. So I'll tentatively say 12 months to go.
When we push Act 3 to beta we'll try to do a veiled preview. We're very happy to have a lot of deep, multi-angled gameplay, but the big challenge we're facing right now is that we have to explain it all to players in a way that's transparent and fun.
One thing I can say is that you're not likely to have any less reading in R2, but more of it will (hopefully) be optional or set up in a way that you can easily breeze by it.