Thank you guys.
I am working on the frontend, making a good progress. Having in mind that Joomla 1.7 now supports non-transliterated aliases (thanks JM) I will probably drop support for URL generation by titles. From now on they will be generated from alias only and, if you don't want transliteration, you simply turn on Unicode Aliases in Global Configuration. Don't think anybody wants punctuation and special characters in their URLs anyway.
I am looking for end of September as the release deadline. It might as well come before that but this is what I can promise right now.