The ‘currently real thing’ before the ‘real thing’ is the now better way to keep track of the progress of the network, since vaults from home have finally started, even if it’s the most basic form i.e. still relying on pre-made Elder droplet nodes; people will be connecting more and more. On that point, I would think eventually that it’ll become very streamlined to update from one test net to another test net, while still connected, minus the occasional bigger resets (until the “final, satisfactory one”, and even then there will still be updates). So, it basically IS the start of the network. And the sooner you get involved in the test nets—even if it’s CLI (which is way better than not-CLI! in fact technically better than anything more advanced because of its limitless albeit droll functionality)—the more testing people/nodes there will be to understand+comprehend where everyone is on this track.
So that path can be seen. It’s only one Section of the network right now. But further test nets will be multiple Sections, and that’s pretty much the network groundwork (unless you start calling a cluster of Sections as Superclusters or some such, if needed down the line for some reason!). Then you have messaging, safecoin tests, safecoin, all the little limitations in between them; I won’t pretend to know all of it. The roadmap has a good amount of stuff to ultimately get to, if looking at Maxwell and beyond. It’s actually looking like probably somewhat longer than “a few months” if going by that (and that’s development, nothing to do with what the price feels like doing before or afterward). It is funny, though, that all people need to see is stagnation before declaring the project dead, yet there hasn’t been an instance of that in ~14 years—unless you count learning as stagnation, by which point you may as well laugh at yourself.
