Development of the final retail game is a separate, parallel branch that runs alongside the Alpha. One isn't dependent on the other.
Not strictly speaking true.
The Alpha would be a branch from the Odyssey branch at a point in time.
All fixes for bugs reported during the alpha I'd expect to be fixed in the main Odyssey branch, then some of the more important/blocking bugs will also get back-ported to the Alpha branch for a hotfix to the Alpha
To me ( as a developer ) seeing almost 4000+ issues in the issue tracker that are not yet even confirmed or marked a duplicate should be worrying.
Let's assume that half are actually duplicates, that's still 2000, lets assume that half of those are actually not considered bugs by the project management ( players are welcome to disagree! ), that's still 1000 issues. Maybe we can be optimistic and assume that 90% of those are minor bugs that will only annoy a very small percentage of players. That would still leave 100 serious issues. Any one of those could take a week or two fully track down and fix.
Realistically they only have, at most 3 weeks of dev time left before release.
Compatibility testing won't start until the middle of next week.
Their 'Compatibility' testing is flawed because they are not taking a 'full' snapshot of our commanders, they appear to only be coping our current ship and credit balance to our alpha commanders.
It's unclear on:
stored modules ( I guess not copied ),
materials ( not mentioned, so no idea ).
inventory ( we didn't have items like suits, hand weapons and new items before - I assume they will wipe our alpha storage and inventory so we start clean again, as we will on go live day )
ranks and reputation ( not mentioned, but I assume they will be copied - unclear if that will have any affect on anything, probably not ).
fleet carriers ( not copied )
squadron info ?
private groups / friends ?
book marks ?
alpha ships ( what about any ships we have bought in alpha, ie if I switch to sidewinder now, will my Asp Exp stay in the station when then copy over my Krait Phantom ? )