I remain interested in this. Seeing the beta pipeline drawn out gives me much more hope for a good final product than the last time. As I recall, in 2010, the alpha went up for about 3 months , then disapeared for a few weeks, and a small beta started that allowed people to play the game for 2 hours here and there every 3rd day or so. Normally a beta starts what, at least 6 months before a product launches but in FFXIV's case it started only around 10 weeks before a hard launch date, the last 3 of which had NO beta test.
This time looks quite a bit different, the alpha has been going on for 3 months non stop and there looks to be another 5-6 weeks of bug fixing before the first beta period commences. Writing 2-4 weeks in that chart reads to me as "hopefully things go smoothly and it's done in 10 days but if not it could take 20 or 25 days". Then 2 weeks to fix whatever problems were found and they are doing this 3 more times before launch.
Add all of that up , couple with 3 months of alpha and it's looking like realm reborn on PC at least will receive twice as much beta testing and alpha testing as the original version did. That's assuming things go smoothly too. Sure the minimum is 4 months , pegging launch somewhere around June but each testing and bug fixing phase could take twice that amount of time. 8 months in other words. That puts us as late as an october launch , while I don't know how serious they are about fixing everything 100% but who knows right?