Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X allows full read/write access to Windows NT, 2000, XP, or Vista NTFS partitions (including disks, thumb drives, etc.) from any Mac application or the Finder.
Not bad for $29.95 intro price.
There's AFP and Samba, but this looks a lot better for most people.
It's mostly normal for an open-source project to take more time. Main reason is that you don't have a marketing team that tells you to put out a release each xxx months even though it might be buggy...
It is true the performance is not on par with FAT32 or the paragon driver, it's enough for me though (I'm not doing heavy stuff however) Might not be enough if you plan on doing video editing or such.
There is however an experimental package that speed things up : http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2007/11/ntfs-3g-11104_05.html