Aside from the user friendliness (with all its own important advantages), it currently creates an amateurish impression. Some activity on the devs side in the forum is also a good sign.
People check the forum to see what the game is about, it’s (in my opinion) therefore even more important than the actual website. I was actually quite disappointed to see this kind of forum (it gave me the impression that the release date would be minimum of 2 years from now). The reason I remained is that I am an OpenTTD buff craving a successor, not because I was very impressed here…
So yeah, I agree that an update helps the actual release, as well as make it easier for us 🙂