This is awesome news. Thanks for the update.
I agree with the decision to make communities a STEEM feature and not only Steemit. That enhances the value of the entire ecosystem. For a breakthrough like that, I am willing to wait a bit longer since it does increase the development time.
It is going to be exciting when all this comes out. The fact that the ability to scale before the traffic arrives is very encouraging. This will avoid what Ethereum and others went through.