Star Citizen's Star Marine Only Delayed for Unknown Amount of Weeks

A few days ago, anticipators of Star Citizen experienced some possibly horrifying news: Star Marine, the game's FPS mode, was delayed indefinitely, according to GameSpot. However, director of community engagement Ben Lesnick has since clarified on the matter, providing a thorough explanation of the delay on the official forums:
 

"The phrase 'delayed indefinitely' being bandied around is incorrect. We do not have a release date to announce yet, which is not the same thing."

He goes on to say that Star Marine has not been canceled:
 

"The short story is that Star Marine was not ready for launch when we had hoped (and planned). We spent several weeks expecting that resolving a then-current crop of blockers would allow a PTU publish. When this didn't happen, we conducted a full review of the module lead by our top technical folks from around the company. What they determined was what you read in [Chris Roberts'] letter two weeks ago: we need to rebuild several 'boring' backend pieces and we need to fix serious animation issues before there would be any benefit to a release."

Currently, there is no new window for Star Marine's release, but it has been confirmed that it will be an indefinite amount of weeks, not months, years or decades, before people will see it surface. Imperium Games hasn't announced a new release date because new issues could set in and cause yet another delay (AKA they're knocking on wood).

Next, Lesnick wanted to address the claims of Star Citizen becoming "Call of Duty in space."
 

"The important thing that I want to point out here is that Star Marine isn't an aside in any way. It's an essential part of Star Citizen, something the rest of the game must have. We aren't making a giant first-person shooter, but we're making a game that needs that technology in order to work."

"Star Marine is the blood and sinew of the game, the connective tissue that plugs planetside into boarding into space combat and so on. One of the least sexy but most important aspects of game development is building the behind-the-screens modules that make up the finished form. For everything you see, there's dozens of pieces working together: audio systems, streaming managers, graphics renderers, physics layers, and so on. Star Marine is that on a macro level... it gets plugged into Star Citizen to build the whole we've dreamed of."

For those that are curious, there has been a blog update yesterday on the official Star Citizen site, which explains that the devs have unlocked the entire Origin 300 series for all backers to test drive in the midst of Arena Commander this week. The reason for the unlocking of all four variants of the 300 series is for community feedback:
 

"As many of you know, these ships will be getting an update pass in the near future, and we'd like your feedback on what else might need to be changed. One of our major goals will be to make sure they match their original role descriptions, which you can review in the 300 reveal post. So please take to the forums, let us know how they fly and what you'd like to see updated!"

It's great that the developers are getting the community involved with feedback, and the ships look extremely pretty. So while Star Marine is put on hold, why not take a dive into a few dogfighting matches with the sleek birds?