There will always be a good reason to postpone the release of Riftrunner. Christmass would have been a very good period to release the game just because there is more potential money floating around and that would balance out the effect of more titles being released. Even in March 2004 there will probably be some major title that will release so I don't think that nowadays there exists a "good" moment to release the game. The only thing you need is huge PR and great marketing.
The only reason why we are lucky to wait is that if Larian would release the game at Christmas it would probably be buggy as hell (with all due respect for the talent of all the Larian programmers of course).
