Even though Oculus has now been through nearly three years of Kickstarter funding, trade show demos, fancy new prototypes, development kit releases, and multi-billion dollar buyouts, the company seems utterly incapable of answering the one question at the front of every VR watcher's mind: when will we see a consumer-ready version of the Rift headset?

Two Oculus executives had the opportunity to finally put the matter to rest at the South by Southwest conference this weekend, but instead they muddied the waters with cagey non-answers. It's enough to make us worry Oculus might be letting the chase for perfection get in the way of releasing a "good enough" initial product in the near term.

As part of the "Ask Us Anything" panel ( archived on Twitch ), Oculus VP of Product Nate Mitchell relayed a comment from a reddit user, who noted that Luckey had previously said "something would have to go terribly wrong for the consumer Rift to not be released by the end of 2015." That's almost exactly how Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe represented the company's position in an interview with Ars last June : "If we haven't shipped by the end of 2015, that's a problem. At least we would be disappointed."

Instead of reconfirming that 2015 target at the SXSW panel, though, Luckey instead seemed to walk back some of his optimism. "[I made the 2015 release statement] before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap, and we've expanded a lot of the ambition we had around the product and what we wanted to do," Luckey said.

Almost in the same breath, Luckey obliquely and confusingly hinted that there's little reason to worry about a delay past this year. "Us partnering with Facebook allowed us a lot of things that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise, like hire 300 people to be working on getting the Rift out as quickly as possible at the level we want it," he said. "I can't comment on the date one way or another in either direction, but I can say that nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right."

Later in the panel, Mitchell jumped in with his own somewhat self-contradictory take on when the Rift will be an actual consumer product. "We've been determined to launch consumer VR and deliver the best consumer headset for a really long time... with the Rift, our team just wants to launch this thing as soon as we possibly can, but with no compromises. And that's really been the key for us. We want to make sure we're delivering the absolute best product at the right time. We're moving as fast as we can, we promise. It will be worth the wait." (Following the panel, an Oculus spokesperson told Ars that "Oculus Rift launch is still TBD. We haven’t issued any formal launch window.")

The goal of releasing a product with "no compromises" is often diametrically opposed to releasing something "as soon as we possibly can." Releasing consumer technology is all about making compromises in order to get a product to market in a timely and relatively affordable manner. Apple compromised on the original iPhone, releasing the first-generation device without 3G cell technology and over a year before the launch of the App Store. Countless software and hardware developers these days similarly aim to release a "minimum viable product" then iterate on that design with post-launch refinements.

After years of watching Oculus refine its prototypes behind the scenes yet continually put off talk of a full consumer release (the consumer version was previously expected for 2014), it's easy to get the impression the company is taking the opposite tack. Oculus seems to be waiting until it can solve every potential problem with virtual reality before even starting down the road to consumer adoption. Rather than settling for a minimum viable product, we worry that Oculus may be looking for a mythical, maximal product that may never be ready.

To Oculus' credit, it has proved it can ship actual hardware in the form of two Rift development kits and the co-developed Samsung Gear VR . Those efforts combined have put VR in the hands of tens of thousands of early adopters (even if the user experience for these devices is far from what would be expected of a consumer product). Oculus is also operating in the shadow of the virtual reality bust of the '90s, which has made many ultra-skeptical of VR's wholesale viability. In the past, Oculus has expressed worries that one bad early VR experience, from Oculus or even a competitor, could sour a potential consumer on the concept forever.

Still, there is such a thing as waiting too long for all the problems to be worked out. Competitors aren't necessarily going to wait. Luckey's comments come just days after Valve and HTC announced their impressive Vive VR headset with a planned 2015 release window, though there's no specific release date or pricing information yet. Sony is now targeting early 2016 for its Project Morpheus VR solution.

Asked if Oculus felt more pressure now that competitors could be threatening to beat the consumer Rift to market, Luckey said it didn't make a material difference. "It doesn't add more pressure because there couldn't possibly be more pressure anyway," he said at SXSW. "Competitors are always going to pop out. We like it when other people get involved. The more people there are making VR headsets, the more content there's going to be, the more game developers can be sure they're going to make money making VR games."

"People are always going to continually enter but we're already under a lot of internal pressure," he continued. "We just want to launch this thing, we want to get it out as quick as we can." Interesting that Luckey didn't include any of those previous release timing qualifiers in that quote, even after the competition was mentioned.

We've already seen the tug-of-war between perfection and timeliness play out once for Oculus. At GDC earlier this month, CTO John Carmack discussed how Oculus and Samsung disagreed about whether the co-developed Gear VR hardware was ready for a full consumer roll out. Samsung was eager to go for a full release, but Carmack and others at Oculus urged delay so they could work out some remaining imperfections with the hardware and software.

The compromise was a soft launch of the Gear VR late last year as a confusingly marketed "Innovator Edition." Then, as Carmack recalled, "a funny thing happened—people kind of like it. When we look back at it, the hardware that Samsung developed probably could have gone wide [as a full consumer product]." Instead, the Gear VR will see its full consumer release later in 2015.

Oculus should take the lessons of that Gear VR launch to heart. After years of promises, consumers are ready to give the new wave of virtual reality a try, even if there have to be some compromises to get a first generation product in their hands right now. At some point, virtual reality has to be good enough to let the masses in on the experience. That point may as well be sooner than later.