I just recently joined this site, and on looking around I see it has been in beta for 3 years now. A year ago there was a question What do we need to do to get out of Beta? and still this site is in beta.
Has there been any indication of a move from beta? I recall seeing some comments, about other sites looking like they were still in Beta, though they had actually reached critical mass for promotion, because of delays in get the permanent site designed and in place.
The stats on the site at Area 51 show that we're a little low on questions per day and answers per question. Things have improved since I asked the question you linked to, but there is still room for improvement. We need more questions and answers. I think we have enough users to provide answers, we just need to drive folks here to ask new ones at a steady rate.
I founded the Personal Finance & Money SE, which has (had?) the distinction of being the longest-running SE beta site ever—yet we did graduate, somewhat recently. It was a long journey.
In our first three years, traffic growth was slow but stable. We started to pick up more momentum in 2013, and in the summer we were told we would graduate. However, it still took 6-7 months to get the new site design in place because of a design backlog.
FWIW, the visitors/day traffic number here at Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair is admirable and similar, in fact, to traffic at PF & Money.
Based on my own understanding of the guidelines [having asked "why won't you graduate us" so many times!] I would suggest that Stack Exchange Inc. would like to see:
On #1: Are the low quality and off-topic questions here being both closed and then deleted? A cleanup effort might help. If an old question has no answers, is it because it wasn't clear? too broad? Consider: There may be many old candidates for closure.
On both #1 and #2: Are users voting enough? Might there be questions with helpful answers that sit and count as "unanswered" simply because nobody has voted up helpful answers? Users should be encouraged to vote more often for both good answers and good questions.
Finally, I'll suggest one thing that would help traffic: Judicious rephrasing of question titles. A successful Stack Exchange site relies on Google search results for much of the inbound traffic. Rewriting vague/terse/crappy question titles using good keywords can make a significant difference. As traffic improves, other metrics ought to get a lift as well. (More questions, more voting, etc.)
