Not quite.
I think what he has done is quite smart.
what was "alpha" is now beta and is running along very well.
The smart thing is that the successful "copy" means that the stable version will run at least as well as the beta is running and he has now moved into a test-and-deploy methodology, and did not lose everyone's scores along the way.

In fact I think he has done rather well compared to some projects that moved into beta/stable too quickly.