This is not Steve's longest absence from the boards at all, it is neither unusual or worrying.
He does not make this game as a job or to please us, it is something he does for his own personal amusement that be happens to want to share and all the rest of us will just have to live with that.
As for bugs, yeah they exist, but none of them make the game unplayable and I kind of doubt we will see any bugfix updates for a while since he is distracted with NA and presumably real life.