I'm not sure "Coming Soon" was the best wording.
We still have a ways to go on testing and then launching and for them to stand by and support the deployment of HF21
That could be 2 more months.
Then as they said they can have some clar time and smooth sailing with nothing but SMTs. But they're not gonna stop there they're gonna create other features like SMT distribution in the form of POB and several other features.

Something like the Steem Proposals was done months ago but it's not launched because 1. We're waiting on a hard fork that's filled with many other things. (which makes sense because you don't want to do hardforks to often if just because it screws up exchanges) 2. we're seemingly waiting on them to support these features with UI deployments.

They could launch the protocol for communities for example soon and without a hardfork but do you think they will before they themselves have a user experience for it even though Steempeak would jump on it quickly and provide a solution. They're still a company and probably don't want to be left in the dust. But steempeak is actively chearing for steemit ... we don't want to be a one interface system. Part of the sale is that there are multiple interfaces.

Thus we come back to timing. 2+ months and then a month of solid focus then another month or so for user experience aspects to be developed. Then testnet for a couple months which may be at the same time as the user experience. Then we're getting into when the team will be pulled in lots of directions with steemfest and then christmas and other holidays.

I saw we're extremely lucky if we see it before 2020 and in fact I'm almost positive it's not 2020 ... early spring target.
Which includes light accounts which are likely to not be terribly difficult to impliment but again we may have to wait for that hard fork because doubtful they'll release something if they themselves don't have a user experience system ready for it even though other apps would love it right now and could start building on it.