From someone in the know (i.e., within Opera software):
“[My] concept of “soon” is obviously different from
many of yours, that seem define it in “before or after lunch”. In the
perspective of the project’s lifetime it is almost done by now, in the
perspective of something we would want to release it’s really not ready yet.“You would not want the Opera 7 of today, you would not want the Opera 7 of
next week, and we would not want thousands of reports on bugs that are about
to be fixed anyway”
(From the newsgroup Opera.beta via Google.)