I don't think it was a "test." It was just a series of untimely deadlines and events that cause the premature release of the KR client. Here's the short version as I understand what happened.
- KR/SA was worked on
- Japanese market made a release date commitment that could not be changed
- KR was released way too early because of said commitment
- Players did not adopt KR because it was not finished
- Merger and Dev team move was in the works, which turned the Dev Team upside down
- After the move, they reassessed the viability of the expansion and KR client
- Work on SA resumes with a focus on overhauling/finishing the KR client
That is a reasonable interpretation.
My interpretation, hopefully as reasonable (and not really incompatible I guess, they could both be right) is as follows.
Darkscribe had a vision of KR replacing 2d. To pull this off, he had to have a modern-looking client that could run on lower-end computers.
This vision didn't work out. UO players didn't want to use KR, for a whole host of reasons.
So now, KR is being upgraded into the SA client ("KR Plus" we could call it) which I suspect will be higher-end, and 2d is staying around for stubborn folks (like me, actually) who held onto 2d.
-Galen's player