Yeah, personally I think even something like an August release might not really be realistic.
Maybe Valve will end up releasing it sometime in September during EPL so they have an entire month to fix all the bugs before T1 tournaments move to CS2. Otherwise it will be pretty funny if they play on a build where there's crazy bugs and wallbangs and other things like that.
They are just parotting the rumor that Thorin started that he heard that October was the date. Idk if anyone really knows. On the same podcast smooya said the teams have been informed that cologne will be on CSGO, but just a few days earlier it was reported from someone at ESL that they were hopeful it would be cs2. And spunj who I imagine would know esl things before smooya also said he hadn't heard the csgo confirmed thing for cologne yet. Imo it would be kind of dumb for cologne to just randomly be on csgo, when the rest of the year we will probably be playing cs2. so I kind of think they will try and have cs2 ready by then. Or maybe they don't give a fuck which would also check out, it just seems like launching cs2 right before one of the biggest tournaments of the year viewership wise works be a no brainer.
Was it just that? I got the impression it was based more on a rumor about Valve going through all of the maps before release, and that taking up so much time the next suitable gap between tournaments would be after EPL?
How fast they get to the next map might be something to keep an eye on. With the Internet Detective Work(tm) done on the Valve Hawaii trip maybe D2->Mirage isn't a good indicator of how fast they can get through them, but Mirage->Whatever could be a better estimate
I would expect the bugs to get hammered out faster and faster as the beta progresses. By the time the last map hits the beta they would theoretically have a lot of the non map specific bugs already worked out.