Is this game already dead? (plus a question about release)

After a long wait, I finally managed to get my hands on the beta. It is very good and it feels slick, but when I went to introduce myself I realized nobody was even on! I thought it might just be a certain time, so I kept playing. I have been playing for 2 hours and this game seems completely devoid of life. So far, I have encountered one person, but I don't even know if he is active. A look on the forums also reveals that virtually nobody has been on the forums for a while. Development of this game seems slow, so I have 2 questions to ask:
1. Does anyone still play?
2. When is the planned release day/how long do you estimate it will be before the game is ready?

The general cycle is that testing is usually fairly active until it's announced that there will need to be a reset for to address some sort of internal system and then the game tends to go quiet until there's a new build / reset. So at the moment things are pretty quiet as people know there's a reset and new build pending.

We don't have a specific release date planned as we've been taking a 'when it's done' approach but we are getting closer and closer to launch after going through various balance passes and bug fixing rounds over the last several months. In theory we should be getting very close to release but the reality is that there's only three of us and we all have day jobs and families so it does unfortunately mean that we're forced to move more slowly than if we were a full time team in the same office. (as opposed to being spread out across three time zones.)