Capital Games TeamA concern this raises for me is that you previously had the scope to delay a new release if required to provide dev time to fix any game-breaking issues, in an 'emergency' manner. This concrete release schedule feels like it will delay any possible 'fixing' that needs done, in favour of more new stuff because new stuff = more money.
I've seen this happened many times with other games. And with the tight schedule they just introduced bugs on top of the bugs until the game was almost unplayable and they had to stop and fix them. That meant that you playing with those bugs for many months.
They already have a concrete release schedule, we just didn't see much of it. All this does is let us know what to expect.