Well I guess I should say that I am an alpha tester. If you want my thoughts on it:
On one of the versions, they fixed the damn memory leak that was annoying... it was horrible to have trillian astra running for 4 days and my system was lagging just to realise the memory size that used to be 25-30 MB went to 415MB. Sadly though, it will still rise, but it will reach a limit of like 95MB.
It still glitches like all hell (But hey, its alpha, right?)
Though, one thing that needs fixing is the stabilizing of Chat messengers. When they went to like build 55 or something, there has been an issue where IM's would randomly lose connection and connect back. That is annoying.
Also there is that weird glitch where the MSN plugin will not have the different statuses work correctly as in if I put an away message with an away status sign, if I go away from it for like 30 min and come back and use the system, instead of just turning off the idle on MSN and the afk time on the other IM's, MSN takes off the idle AND the status, but all other status signs and messages stay the same. In example:
I am not here - away = MSN
later becomes
I am not here - Online = MSN
I am not here - Away = All other IM's
It isn't ready to be beta yet.
Though it does look interesting on Vista since it will use the Aero effect on it.
Oh, and skin themes still suck on Trillian Astra. Most of the Themes don't make a change to the text in most of the IM's which can be a bother for if you have blue and say you use Yahoo IM where someone is using blue text... well... you'll either have to highlight it to view it or change the skin to something that will let you see the blue text.
Highlighting can suck as well as it auto-copies what you highlight in the IM window (Thus, moment you let the click go, you lose the highlight), but doesn't do it in the typing window. However, the pasting in the type window can mess some people's text settings up as it still tends to change to the style that it was when it was on the chat window. But, if you copy from say a web page and paste it over to the chat window, then it usually just uses your text settings.
Overall, it is looking good, but I do agree that for something thats been worked on for 2 years, it is rather annoying that it is only at this point. But since its at build 83, it makes me wonder that if it gets to build 100, will it go into beta status?