He is working on a 1.8B patch to fix the most impactful bugs. It should be out in the next couple of days.
The next release content never gets posted straight away. Maybe a single bullet point confirming the main focus of 1.9 in a week or two. But more info gets posted once in active development.
My guess the Q1 release window is a result of two things. 1 Roundscape has not been the soul focus lately due to Starmaker, so I think this will be the focus now for the early part of the year. 2 the community reaction to the 1.8 release and not wanting to provide unrealistic ETAs.