Sorry i wasn’t suggesting that they have some sort of bias because of the other comments but it has been debated regularly from people outside the community trying to push their opinion in an overly aggressive manor to then project that aggression and claim it is them who are receiving the aggression .
There have been very many valid points against the advertising route that have been argued before in many different posts.
The fact that there will be no solid release date is an important factor, it will be released slowly over time, more features and greater access over sprints or periods of time, there is no real definitive “release date”
Like i have said before, the thing you have mentioned that will cost money will most likely be free because those journalists for most of the news tech sites actually send their journalists after the stories they wish to see, yes it is possible to pay for news stories to be published , and it is usually a technique used by coins that have very little market cap who wouldn’t otherwise be noticed or sought after naturally by interested parties.
There has already been numerous stories publish , it is a crowdfunded project that is one of the highest crowd funded projects in the history of crowd funded projects , it has a huge following, many investors. They know about the project and are following closely .
Some of the ideas you put forward if not most are advertising to the group that maidsafe is already most well known to (the crypto crowd) advertising to people outside of the crypto crowd would maybe be an idea but then again , how do you make it cost effective and time currently , is money for the developers of this project, i have insomnia and i think this team has been awake and working their asses off longer than i have been awake this past year, trying to cut costs with time wasted could end up delaying the project by weeks possibly and has done in the past as david has said to answering questions related to the tech.
Edit:there is also weekly updates regarding what has been done and will be done the next week
MaidSafe Dev Update :safe: 27 October 2015 , google docs wont show up on this thread , but looking at the transscript at the bottom of op
there is a hell of a lot of development in educating people and informing them of the technology of maidsafe,
this either looks like you are not aware of it , or think there needs to be more dedicated to advertising than there already is, currently in progress .