Only a year for the Big Wait is an extremely optimistic guess. Personally I don't think it will be less than 3, as it's called "Big" for a reason, rather than "normal, on the short side". When it comes to the dev log postings, there's sort of a logic of roughly once per week, but it has been as short as 3 days and as long as almost a month in between posts, so it varies wildly. It largely depends on what Toady's doing, as an entry listing a number of dead end approaches that didn't work out isn't particularly interesting, if it's been such a week, and at the other end of the scale Toady'd rather continue on what he's doing than break off from it to write a log entry (which I can fully sympathize with).
As to Romi's question, the answer is, as mentioned, that we don't know (and Toady likely doesn't either, but at least he knows where he's aiming currently, but he usually won't tell, as his aim is rather typical for SW development, so it's better to say nothing and adjust than to disappoint people [some of which take a vague guess as a holy promise, and get rather upset when the guess was off]). I'd recommend starting a fortress now, as that will get you back into it (if you can handle the current stress system, that seems to be quite stressful for a number of players). Also, I'd expect the next release to be a bug fest, as there is going to be a whole pile of new things in it, which typically results in the rapid discovery of a number of serious bugs when the release gets into player hands (those will get fixed reasonably quickly, but that's another week or two [or more] until it's reasonably stable again).