Alright, so apparently I have to do some rumor control, even though I have had this conversation before with some of you.
1.7 has been available as a beta server (which we and the bukkit team consider stable) since December 18, 2013. The latest beta build was released on February 12, 2014. Since there have been 3 beta releases we consider it stable enough.
The hacked together builds of "1.7" were not 1.7. Although it did allow 1.7.2 clients to connect, none of the 1.7 features were present. It was extremely unstable with bugs everywhere. This version was released somewhere around Halloween. For comparison, the first Development build of bukkit 1.7.2 was released on December 1, 2013. That was the first time ANY of the 1.7 features were made available for servers.
The community voted to wait for a stable 1.7 server for Freedom. That's what we did. We have not been working on this server for 6 to 8 months, more like the past 1 month to a month and a half. We delayed starting construction just in case anything happened which could potentially cause our work to completely disappear.
We have to release the server as a Beta initially because of all the features the server is going to have. Things will be tweaked based on player feedback. At this point, there are a few things to go before we can release the server in beta: spawn and player housing areas will need imported into a freshly generated 1.7.2 world, plugins need configured, current free players added to whitelist, and permissions need done (will take the longest).
We're not going to release this (even in beta) until its completely ready.