Ok I have posted on the socom boards about this but here is my take...
I wiill admit that QA is what killed the 1.5 patch, and QA prob killed the Clan Ladder functions from releasing with the original game... The community pushed and pushed for the release and if you remeber though it was not active the beta showed the clan ladders in it...
I feel that many are reading the 1.6 patch purpose wrong... 1.5 is going to come out complete but the clan ladder will not be pushed to its limits until everyone gets in there. They apparently do not have enough to mimic 9k players using the clan ladder. So once they release 1.5 and we all jump on the clan ladder and push it past the limits tested so far, they are prepared to make adjustments to that with 1.6. It will probably be minor in comparison to what had to be done to bring 1.5 online.
I will agree that the content on 1.5 is not really new news but they did admit that there are open issues... that is the first time they openly posted that. I know that on the S\6 twitter page last night they had posted that the final version was submitted for approval, but when I checked it today, the post was gone.
So they are very close.
I know QA can be a pain as I own an IT Company and we deal with delays from QA all the time. I am actually thankful that QA is putting it through the ringer...
So I am happy to sit back and wait...