It arrived only slightly late as I recall because Mark is a stickler for stability and quality of product.
It was to do with a question mark hanging over the legalities of having MD2 support, if i remember correctly....? We were promised cubemapping - and it is in there isn't it? That's what almost everyone wanted once they'd seen 'Robs' demo - well now we have it! As promised - delivered.
I've also noticed that even when people DO get what they ask for, if they aren't moaning about it, they're instantly moaning about [the lack of] some other feature they didn't even know existed until they heard about it in an interview with some technical bod from iD software.People who are constantly waiting for "the next big thing", might as well leave now, imho (although I'm no authority here - an opinion, is all) - because they'll never ever code anything.
I've also noticed some people's incredibly ability to over-react to circumstance - for instance, when Idigicon's website was down for a few days while it moved servers last year, the rumour-mongers were out in force and before you know it, Idigicon have gone bust (they haven't, but that's what people said in certain circles). The same thing happens every time Blitz updates are more than a month apart - you can put money on a spate of "Blitz3D Dead?!" or "No more updates?!" threads appearing more or less overnight. In fact, the only people who brand Blitz 'dead' are the ones who have never done anything worthwhile with it anyway, so why do they make such a fuss??
Even if Blitz3D never got another update, its far from dead. How can it be dead when its so usable? My copies of Blitz/Blitz3d have paid for themselves hundreds of times over. Even WITHOUT cubemapping! :)
If you think Blitz is dead (as of 1.85), reinstall version 1.64 - the first official release, and try using that for a couple of weeks. You'll be surprised at how much its evolved.