We weren't happy with the time tracking integration in Classic. It was usable, but it wasn't great. We want to take our time to either come up with a better built-in solution or an integration with another tool or something else.
This is a big part of why we're keeping Basecamp Classic around for a very long time. Basecamp Next was not going to launch with all the features that Classic already has. So it's OK that it's not a perfect fit for all existing customers on Day 1.
The iPhone didn't have copy'n'paste for a while, either. There's just so much you can do for launch, if you want to ship.
The iPhone anecdote is such an important one. Probably the most important lesson I learned working at Apple was: people don't remember that a feature was missing once you implement it, but they remember broken features long after you've fixed them.
There is a disclaimer, "Some stuff on the Goodbye list is completely gone from Next, while other things are just executed differently enough that they don’t resemble the way things worked in Classic... There’s some stuff on Goodbye that we ended up keeping."
That said, it's probably worth keeping this "goodbye list" in mind when DHH says carefully hedged things like how the team is "looking into how we can solve people's time tracking needs with a great workflow in Basecamp Next." There's a good chance that will NOT be time tracking as you know it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think you should be kept waiting around for a feature that may be axed.
If you're committing to adding Time-Tracking in the future, publicize it, so users like me will be confident that it's worth sticking with Basecamp.
Until that happens, you're telling us, "Sorry, you're not our target user base."