FYI, pull request 1046 was just merged in, which implements the Html.Partial and Html.RenderPartial helpers. It does not, at this point, provide support for returning a partial view from a controller.

In my mind, I have no strong doubts about whether DNN 8 will come out on time (January 2016) or whether it will include MVC support. I think the two issues that you're running up against are, first, that (unfortunately) many of the involved folks have given up on these forums, preferring pull requests, twitter, and other, smaller, venues for communicating. Secondly, many of the folks who are deep into DNN don't have significant MVC experience, so they aren't trying the new MVC parts out. So, there's certainly a danger that the MVC component will need updates after 8.0.0 comes out and more holes are visible. However, I'm ultimately hopeful that the MVC module development paradigm will become strong and useful (and I plan to be pushing it to be such).

To clarify a few things:

1. No, we have not given up or abandoned the forums.  We still monitor the forums and respond when we have concrete information we can provide.  The reality is that the team is very focused right now on getting DNN 8 complete and ready to go and that is our top priority.  We have a great community who can help users through most issues.

2. You can get help here on the forums.  No reason to go anywhere else.  That doesn't mean it will always come from one of the engineers or even from myself since we have a lot of work on our plates to get DNN 8 done.

3. When Charles first looked at this he did not think Partial View support was possible. We had a community member add the Partial and RenderPartial HtmlHelper methods.  We don't currently have support for PartialViewResult  as a return type in controller actions and are evaluating what it would take to add that.  I don't know whether this aspect of Partial View support will make it into DNN 8 or not but we are looking at it.  Regarding the contest, part of the reason for having the contest is so that we can get people to actually put this stuff to use.  Most frameworks do not get ironed out until someone starts really trying to push the limits with the framework.  If I thought the implementation was perfect and fully complete, there would be less reason to have the contest.  I want people to tell us where something is missing that just can't be worked around easily.  While partial views are important, it is certainly possible to build quite robust applications without them.  If I had enough users giving feedback that it was important then it would be a reason to re-examine our priorities.  This already happened with  the SPA framework as we had some community members work on SPA apps and provide feedback on areas that we needed to fix (in a few cases they even provided pull requests). 

4. Yes we are still on track for a January release.  While we have shifted some of the internal dates regarding CTPs, Betas and RCs we are still targeting the same release timeframe.  Is there a chance it could slip a week or two? Of course.  This is software after all and no date is guaranteed until it all the features are done and the quality checks pass - which usually doesn't happen until a week or so before the release.  As for the Source for CTP7, I have updated the download package - although realistically the best place to get source is from GitHub.