People wouldn't be happy if they just released it because it's basically useless at the moment anyway and eventually it'll flood online with cheaters. It'll be released eventually when it can be used for something productive. "delaying" doesn't mean "we're going to release it exactly the way we have it now, but in several months to be annoying", delaying means they still want to work on it before releasing anything. It's like asking a company to just release a half-finished game now instead of "taunting" people with trailers while they work on it.
I don't think your half finished game analogy is correct. It would be like having a team of 50 people work on the base engine of a game and get stuck on a single feature. One person figures out the feature, and refuses to let the rest of the team know how to do it so they can't continue to develop.
Also if they are afraid of being labeled as the people who enabled piracy, they could release it through anonymous channels. I don't expect a homebrew channel now, I just want all interested parties to be able to tinker further and not be hung up on a solved problem.