Alex is here every day, and if you just read his posts, you can tell that actual work's getting done daily.
On the other hand, you want it fed to you in nicely-wrapped bites, which is quite a bit harder. Official updates can take quite a bit of time (like, sometimes a man-day) to push out- you'd be surprised how long it takes to make a "what did I do this week" kind of post. Or a week can go by and all he'd have to say is, "did a bunch of experiments with the visuals of Hyperspace, and all of it sucked; will do more of this next week"
I think that the direct communications we see from Alex and the other team members on occasion are more productive, because it's probably not eating into dev time too much. That, and there's no, "you didn't post a blog this Friday, is the game dead?" nonsense.
Bear in mind, the team has been getting over what is probably the very largest remaining "hump" for this update- finally going from Systems to a Sector, which is a huge thing. After this build, it's not downhill, but it's a much different vantage point and we're all going to need to re-assess, most likely. We're just glad to know that he's getting there; this is the big one.
