Don't get me wrong, I understand where you're coming from. The disruption of the big "The Shattering" story arc really upset me.
I'm just mean to say that creating a new client was a massive, massive undertaking and because it had such a painful beta, it consumed all the resources around it and has pushed out SA (which looks like it was intended to be the centerpiece of new content) somewhere off into the murky unforeseeable future.
What we're seeing now is a return to focusing on live content - nagging bugs, tweaking, preparing events of various scales of ambition. I can't say I have a good sense of the resources available to work on the game, but my read of the tea leaves is that UO has survived the worst of the fallout of last year.
However, I think the real test of how serious the revival is will come when/if WAR is released. Will EA decide to try to cannibalize its older customer base to achieve critical mass in the latest and greatest tech or will UO and DaoC be the "birds in the hand" that it will want to preserve or even expand against the fickle loyalties and untested costs of the next generation of games? I wouldn't dare hazard a guess, but I do see it as the next turning point. edit: oops, forget the critical mass part