I could have started 5 minutes ago and have a playable alpha. There is an example game in the UE4 dev tools that would need barely any tweaking. That's not an accomplishment. It should worry you that it took them weeks to release that.
Development for Open Tournament is going to be dang slow. There is no way to sugar coat it. They don't have a full time development team. The other problem with it is simply that the UT community is way too schizophrenic to come up with a well balanced game with good gameplay. Been there, done that.
We didn't use the shootergame template. We started from scratch so we could make our own weapon system that would allow anyone to easily make new weapons via blueprint extremely easily. We did this because we had the modding community in mind for the future. Obviously if we used that template we would have progressed further, but the programming leader thought it would be best to start from scratch.
Development is slow because most of us are young and started the project when university finals were right around the corner. What took weeks to develop could have been done in 3-4 days with complete focus.
Besides, at least we were trying to do something instead of just picking our asses and smelling our fingers. That's why this community is the way it is. No one will step up and try to change things. I'm not content with having no new UT game for 6 years, especially after Tim said they had no plans to make a new ut we figured we might try and do something, just for fun.
Now that they announced that they are resurrecting it, we couldn't be happier. We hope they follow the model we planned and make a solid core with a few example ctf/dm maps. Essentially a demo's worth of content with mod-ability.