I am not surprised in the least that the DDI tools aren't ready yet. In fact, I'm glad they're not ready.
I work for a small software development company. I won't say what company it is for privacy reasons and because I'm sure you won't have heard of them - the software is targeted towards factories and businesses, not consumers. A few months ago we had a big customer conference where our customers from around the world got together in one place to talk about the industry and where our products were going. We had two new products that we were aiming to release for that conference. The developers worked long hard nights (one developer in particular I know was working 80-hour weeks) to get the products ready to go out the door by the date of the conference, and we released those two products just in time.
My role in this company is technical support, and let me tell you I was horrified that they had let those two products go out the door. They were buggy as all hell, and the company knew it, but it wanted to release it in time for the big event. Even though they announced the release and gave out free copies of the software for people to try during the event, they didn't start actually selling the software until a few months later when they released version X.01 of both products. This is still a nightmare for me in tech support, though, because copies of the X.0 product are floating around, and I'm sure for a while we'll get a lot of people calling in about problems we've since fixed. (At least this time they released it as an X.01 instead of juts X.0 again... a few years ago we released two CDs that had the same exact version, just different dates, and it was a huge headache to figure out whether the customer had the old buggy X.0 CD or the newer, better X.0 CD.)
Basically, what I'm saying is if the products aren't ready yet then WotC shouldn't release them. I'm glad they're smart enough to wait until they have a good product to show it to us. We saw how well the alpha testing of Gleemax went.
Software development is such a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" world. If you wait until you have a good product then customers complain and somebody else might scoop you with a similar product, but if you release as soon as you can you'll have a buggy product that may horrify people and turn them off of your future products. Since WotC pretty much has control over this market and have little fear of being scooped I think they are making the best decision to wait instead of releasing an unfinished product at an arbitrary deadline (the release of 4e).
