Would you then suggest that subsequent communications from the core team about an 18 month schedule (take, for example, the original project manager upholding his 18 month timeline from mid-September 2000) were made in bad faith?

Why would anyone suggest that? I see optimism, some folk being better informed than others, chaos, confusion, delights, surprises, unrealistic expectations, disappointments -- the usual ups and downs of real life.

Nat introduced an explicitly unreliable 18 month timeline on August 18th, 2000:

There are still some unspecified dates ... I'll unilaterally decide those ... The final release will be on (he picks a date approx. 18 months from the start of the project) 1 January 2002. ... Remember, the further into the future one peers, the less reliable the crystal ball is.

On September 3rd he wrote:

I hadn't envisaged the sheer number of RFCs

I do not think he was "upholding his 18 month timeline" when he wrote the first post you linked:

I want this RFC hell to end, and I want us to stick to some of the major milestones (and Larry's release of the language specs is one of those).

A week later, on Sept 20, he posted the second message you linked:

I talked with Larry about schedule. I'd been under the impression he was going to produce a draft language spec on October 1, and the final on October 14. He set me straight: draft on October 14 (his keynote to the Atlanta Linux Showcase), no deadline yet for final spec. ... Larry said he wanted to have a comment on every RFC by October 14. That's a lot of work :-)

I suspect Nat had gotten confused by this time. How could Larry produce a draft spec from the RFCs the same day the RFC process ended? This seems to conflict with skud's schedule and common sense.

Nat thought Larry producing a comment per RFC by Oct 14 was "a lot of work". But he also thought Larry had said he'd have a draft spec done by the same day. Again, I suspect Nat had gotten confused. (For the record here's a summary of what Larry did for ALS.)

At this point, the timeline past September 30th was not only "unreliable", as Nat had already written it was, with the longer term milestones the most unreliable of all, as Nat had also already written, but was essentially unknowable until Larry wrote the spec.

And the rest, as you say, is searchable history.