We’re shipping 5.0M1 today (5/19/2006) and the download links are currently being updated.
Much of the delay in getting the release out were our dependencies on the Callisto train and getting synchronized versions of WTP 1.5 and an Eclipse RC candidate that had truly frozen APIs (post-M6) and that fixed breaks in debugging like this one that wasn’t fixed until 3.2RC3. This bug in particular prevented most debugging operations from working properly in Eclipse. The point being that if we’d shipped something any earlier it likely would not have been particularly useful and would have been broken by the next Eclipse M/RC release due to the build fluctuations we were seeing.
Even with our milestone builds we strive for the best quality we can deliver and the minimum of migration issues for our users. We took the extra time on 5.0M1 in an attempt to ensure that this remained the case. I think we succeeded, but time will tell. In any event, future milestones should be much more regular now that the platform issues have stabilized somewhat.