The game is being made to generate profits for the devs and the publisher and will not be a charity. Regardless of what Salty/Cyrup think on the matter, the publisher will expect to see a return on all of the development costs invested into PQ3. As the game has no entry price, revenues are going to have to be generated in game.
The Gems of War operational model has worked very well for the devs and the publisher. As you imply (most likely correctly), the devs are probably not going to create a business model for the game that is significantly different from what already has been proven to work well in the past.
My personal take, but I would not expect the PQ3 apple to fall far from the GoW tree.
There has been no official timeframe given so far, which is normal. Salty’s normal position is to not announce such things greater than 2 days in advance of that event.
That said, there was an indirect unofficial projection given a week and a half ago (which may or may not be accurate anymore) by Salty.
This lines up with personal projections for when I am expecting the update to land.
The cookie crumbs are out there if anyone wants to do some sleuthing, but the update should be rather close now. While this is Early Access, it won’t be the end of the world as if a GoW update misses its release window. That said, I would think though that devs would strongly prefer to release 0.36 by their planned target date (because of reasons).