because Karma development is "all but finished."

What I mean is this:

Karma is released. Arguably, it's finished (bar bug fixes etc.). There's no point in having the empeg users as guinea pigs for it. There will be no new features added to Karma until Karma 2 (assuming that there will be one). Therefore, no need for empeg owners to test them -- Karma owners can.

This does not mean that the code base has been abandoned. Far from it.

Think of it like this (I'm not saying that this is what happened; it's just a thought experiment):

1) Rob wants to continue development on the car player, because he loves us so much.
2) He knows that he'll never get permission to do this.
3) He tells the powers-that-be that, since there's no Karma hardware available for beta testing yet, that he can get the code tested by releasing it to the empeg community -- where he knows that there's a ready pool of smart people who write good bug reports -- as an alpha release.
4) The v3.0-alpha3 comes out.
5) It gets hammered on.
6) Karma hardware becomes available.
7) Rob rewards the empeg community for testing -alpha3 by releasing -alpha5 when the team get a breather between Karma bugfixes.

Now the Karma hardware is available, persuading the powers-that-be to allow another empeg release out the door is much much harder.

It's not that the code is stale -- it's that fixing the code up to work on the car player is a day or two of work, plus a couple of evenings of bug fixing, plus an afternoon cooking the release.

All of this is hard to justify when the car player no longer generates tangible revenue.