I won't touch the question of when it'll be done, but I can definitely recommend some mods.
Ascendency and
Project Ironclads are two very solid, bug-free total conversions. Ascendency is actually pretty much feature-complete, I think, and very tightly balanced. It features bigger, slower battles, with shields having a diminished role. Very different look, sound, and feel to combat. Ironclads has some more ships coming, but most everything is already in place. Tons of cool new weapons, more of a naval warfare feel to it. Both of them feature factional warfare and a bit of narrative structure that the vanilla game currently lacks, plus some cool mechanics (contracts, reproducible weapons/ships, etc.).
If you want to expand your vanilla game,
Fleet Control adds some very cool non-combat elements—mining, trading, building your own base, constructing fleets, and so forth.
Blackrock Drive Yards has a bunch of my favorite (and favorite-looking) vanilla-balanced modded ships. Keep an eye on
Uomoz's Corvus, too; it integrates a whole bunch of more-or-less vanilla balanced mods and organizes them into factions, which livens up the vanilla campaign quite a bit. The latest version should be out soon.