9.2 rc is certainly looking good but the release is probably about a week ahead of the time it should have been put out to the public.
Noted. For the the next release candidate, we'll pick a time when we think it's ready then wait 7 days before actually copying it to the FTP site. :)
In all seriousness, none of the issues you raise have actually been filed as bug reports (auto-tune doesn't work correctly? In what respect? What older drives, and what incompatibility issues?) so I'm guessing 9.2.0-RC actually works FINE in those areas and the bugs are elsewhere! Which people have been filing, and we thank them for that.
We are a small development group (seriously small - we can all fit into a single phone booth, assuming one can find a phone booth anywhere, anymore). While we all "live on" the builds well before the -RC is cut (we live on builds while they are still in -ALPHA state, and we don't even release the ALPHA builds publicly!) and fix the problems that we encounter, we can't possibly hit every part of the UI in every build - it takes a lot of people to do that. Even things that seem painfully obvious we often don't run into because our hardware is different than yours, or we've been upgrading our systems in ways we're personally comfortable with rather than the ways that some of you do (seriously folks, wtf!) or we don't run them under Qemu running under Virtualbox running under KVM, or whatever.
Seriously, you folks do some weird stuff, and when we release a -RC all the folks who wouldn't even consider running a BETA (which we also released) go "Ahhhh!! This is going to be the release?? We'd better run it!!" and then they stub their toes on everything we missed. And file bugs. Which we fix. Seriously, check it out. We're fixing stuff every day, and FreeNAS is getting better and better as a result. We also won't ship 9.2.0-RELEASE until all the show-stopper bugs are fixed (and we're pretty broad in our definition of what we consider show-stopping) so, in a very real sense, the ship date of 9.2.0-RELEASE will be dependent on the bug reports we get.
http://bugs.freenas.org - check it out!
Thanks!