It took us about one and a half years. Honestly there's a part of me that would love to start over knowing what I do now, especially with the map. I'd have loved the mod 10 enhancements, I even ended up making a ton of custom changes. I don't think there was an untouched dragon script at all. I've gotten really good working with World Forge. I've made some pretty major changes using it.
One word of warning to any new map makers out there. Don't make any tweaks with World Forge until you are absolutely sure you are finished with Dragon. I made a major error. There were some static placement script changes I had meant to do before completing the base map. I remembered that after spending about 40 hours tinkering around with World Forge fixing transistion errors. I could have screamed (in fact I think I did). But at some point you just have to declare it done and move on. It will never be perfect. *cringes*
I've also gotten good using things like UOCopy. That's a nice way to add slightly larger features later.
I can't even imagine the number of man hours that have gone into Shattered Alliance's revised map. I have been thinking about that a lot lately. I think it would qualify as a full time job for myself during the last two years.
We opened fully last week. There is still some minor static construction to be done, but there will always be some of that. I'm not sure what to do with myself. Two years of time researching and building a map for a game for which I don't even get paid. The player's reactions have made it all worthwhile though.
If you're interested in a peek at what we've done. I've got some samples here.
http://paint.unt.edu/safiles/scenes/index.html
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. When Im -almost- done I decided to do some more major changes and delete half of the map, just so I can remake it into another fashion.
Builds character and whatnot. Of course, had Dragon existed when I started making my map in the first place - things might have been different 
