Also fairly extensive CR changes, and holidays right in the middle of all that; I have to admit I took a bit of time off. <ducks>
No argument, though, this definitely took a long time relative to stuff that's in the patch that the average player might look forward to. I see it as paying off some technical and design debt - sometimes there's just a lot of non-fun stuff that needs to be done.
what does really soon mean 1 day or 1 week?
You know about the soon(tm) thing, right? There's a (tm) after the "really soon", too. But let me put it this way: I'm planning to only do testing and fix bugs I run into from now until the release. I'll probably build the first release candidate today or tomorrow.