This won't really help explain things all that well, but I wanted to let you all know that I've taken all of the development resources and put them onto stability assignements instead of working on phase 2.0 features.
I'm sure you'd all agree that having a fast, stable site is a lot more important than whatever new features we have planned for our next major release.
These projects are broken down into a few areas:
1. Database improvements. You've already heard about a lot of things happening and this is still a work in progress. Although you have not noticed because of other issues, the database performed a lot better over the weekend and today than it has in the past weeks.
2. Site development changes. Upgrading to .NET 2.0 and some other related upgrades.
3. Backend service optimizations. A lot of services that handle all of the grunt work, like updating the prices on your items and adding store windows need to be revisited.
4. Website slowness. A lot of what we're doing above is designed to solve the website slowness. But I wanted to mention it here as some additional optimizations not mentioned above will be specifically to improve site speed.
-Kevin