Leonadial and others,
We're making great progress on 5.2 and internal testing is going well. We still hope to have something in your hands this month. Here's an update on the individual areas mentioned in the intial post based on our current testing:
Outlook 2010 64-bit support - this is looking good.
AutoAssign/Filing enhancements - this is looking good, and we're especially excited about our simpler, automated take on the concepts we previously introduced with "Notification Managers" for automated "bacn" emails.
More flexible date management - this is looking good in both sidebar and organizer.
Organizer and Dashboard filters - we'll likely do only minor tweaks to the project sidebar and task organizer functionality based on both time constraints and new feedback coming in. Once we get the 5.2 release out in the next few weeks, we will definitely make a wave of improvements based solely on feedback on the new features in 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2. So please keep suggestions coming.
Bugs - this is looking good w/ 5.1.1 fixes plus a few others in testing.
Regarding the specific list of items in Leonadial's post, we hope to address some of those in 5.2, but a lot of the challenge in those areas lies in UI and usability to make the features accessible and understandable to people. It's likely that we gradually add in some of those options rather than add a lot of complexity to the product all at once. We REALLY appreciate that kind of specific feedback and are definitely taking it into account as we prioritize how and where to make tweaks/improvements to the sidebar and dashboard functionality.
Thanks to everyone for your great feedback and patience as we get closer to the finish line for this release and begin to plan/prioritize for upcoming releases.