Just figured I should throw my two cents in as well.
Addressing Kane Hart
First of all I am displeased with the video calling out the mod authors and such, it literally took about a dozen attempts on my part to sit and listen to it as it just strikes me as a terrible idea regardless of the issues at hand as I have seen it backfire spectacularly more times than I care to admit to. As well as being really disappointed that there were a few parts where I felt the line was crossed between intelligent statements of concern into inflammatory comments and personal attacks on some of the authors.
My final thing is in the end you came across as trying to threaten them with other mods replacing them which isn't a good idea when you want someone to do something for you.
XY and EU appear to be much younger than IC/IC2 and I don't think either of them intends to try and directly muscle IC2 out it's current niche.
I'm going to stop now, As far as I know you are a decent person as I really haven't noticed you before but in the last two days whenever I have seen your activity on forums it has been in a negative light.
Done addressing Kane Hart
Addressing IC2 team
I would like it if there was more communication but I have long since come to terms with the fact that for most mods the community as a whole with all the children and childish members makes that almost impossible with the nagging and complaining for and about ETAs.
I am completely uneducated on the issues of build-systems and such so I can't speak out one way or the other.
With regards to out-side help with fixing problems, it's your call, it sounds like there are some people with the talent to help if it is a workload issue but again from my own experience sometimes too many people with their differing work and code styles leads to stuff breaking more spectacularly down the road.
Again I'm not personally informed with minecraft modding but it sounds like the 1.4 update will shake things up again for the coders and authors so in my opinion it might be best for us all to just leave things be and just chill and deal with it until things settle down to the point where the future is predictable.
With regards to betas and testing, I have no strong opinion either way, it would be nice to have open access to testing pre-releases but again looking at other mods it is pretty much pointless without a proper error reporting set up and a system and rules in place to discourage the people who make "something broke, fix it" style error reports without useful info.
I'm done for now, my train of thought is long gone after trying to write without sounding like I am attacking either side.