I would love to see a public release too. I've been checking this forum regularly for weeks now, since the first post in this thread promised a public beta on a certain date, so it's been a little bit frustrating. It would've been more so if I hadn't read about the good progress that appears to have been made in terms of features and bugfixes.
However, the fix for the bug that slows down window display is a MAJOR thing. There has always been an actually quite long (in computer terms) pause between rendering the FARR window and then displaying it's contents. I always thought of it as a necessary wait rather than a bug so I was glad to hear that it has been banished. It even seems like it would be worth releasing a fix for it in v1 to tide over non beta users until v2, if it would be easy to do.
After all that, I hope you don't mind if I throw in a feature request here: Hide system tray icon. I never use it and it just wastes space down there. Of course, if this feature were implemented then running the FARR exe would have to show the FARR window instead of starting another instance. WinPatrol has this feature. It's another absolutely essential program for windows. So much so that I wouldn't ever dream of closing it. I think of it as a service and am happy to have it running constantly without my approval. This feature would be great in FARR because I think of it almost in the same way.
Actually, now that I've posted I may as well ask that you send me the beta. I'd appreciate it.