The real issue is that the CB team had something pretty solid, if not feature rich at the RC1 stage. They decided that while solid, RC1 needed a major overhaul of several systems, so a rewrite begin. Technically they took a step backward to 0.9, and continued like RC1 had never been released, as in no feature freeze.
I believe this is mainly because the CB team believed that Codeblocks would be much more usable, and therefore worth a 1.0 release if they fixed so outstanding issues in RC1. The bad news we essentially jumped from release candidate stage back to alpha testing because these changes required major rewrites, as well as a linux build system change, etc.
I do share your frustration from some standpoint, I think the CB team should put something on the wiki like Ogre's roadmap. That way everyone knows what is left to be done, what the current goals are etc. I too hope we will go into beta soon.
EDIT- It is also more fun as developer to just add, feature after, feature (ie feature creep) rather freeze and bug fix. That said the CB does an excellent job bug fixing most issues that are reported.
