Yes, I expect to see these "dates have been missed before" comments up to the day it hits production.

There's a big difference between "we have a design worked out and think it will take this long" and "we've been running the new system in production for a year, merging it with the old system is relatively easy, and we've got all the clients running the merge together on a public test network." Historically, anything they've gotten to the point of a multi-client testnet has taken well under a year to go live.