Brian,
I see your point, and I think we all agree that 5.0 needs to be out soon, and we should thank Shaun for giving us a little guidance on when that might be.
The thing you must understand about creating a sustainable revenue model around DotNetNuke is that it is not quite as simple as charging $20 for the software. While you are right in saying that most of us would gladly pay to use this great product, we would also have much higher expectations for a product we paid for. For DotNetNuke Corporation to charge money for their product they would need to set more strict quality standards which would probably require hightened code review and testing processes, which would require more dedicated resources. At that point you have to sit back and ask yourself "what is the best model to persue that yields the greatest returns while maintaining open source ideals and preserves the ecosystem?". This is not an easy question to answer, and definitely not an easy question to answer when you are trying to release a major version of your software AND you are short on the revenue to support that development.
The announcement of DNN Professional greatly raises the ceiling for all of us offering services around DNN. Many people have lemented on this board that it's hard to sell dotnetnuke because of a host of reasons mostly related to stability (both in the application and the organization behind that application). Now it's a much more enterprise viable solution because of stability, support, indemnification, and security notifications. Organizing and funding such an effort is not easy, but for anyone operating a business based around DotNetNuke, this should be a welcome evolution to DotNetNuke.
We are all a little bit disappointed in the time it's taken to get 5.0, and I think communication like Shauns post really helps everyone understand whats going on. Most of us just want something to tell our customers about the 5.0 timeline. But DotNetNuke Corp. has had their hands full building a business model that will grow the ecosystem and overall adoption of the software that many of us make our living off of. I am sure most of the Corp. would love it if it were just as simple as turning around and charging $20 a pop and calling it a day.
Hang tight, DotNetNuke is not even in it's prime yet. The best is yet to come.