As to those who are "almost finished". I can understand that you've been aiming for a platform for a long time, and if you were heading towards it thinking that it's a cheap (or free) option for you, this can be a body blow. However, I'm afraid the reality is that all exports have to cover their costs. I'd love to be able to make a platform and just release it free - I have after all been trying to do a Raspberry Pi one for about 3 years now. But maintenance costs. A bug in controllers? Someone has to spend time fixing that. An SDK update that changes the whole networking system, someone has to spend weeks updating that. None of this is free, and there simply isn't enough users on console to be able to realistically spread the maintenance costs as we do on other platforms.
Every platform needs to be maintained, they all need updating at some point. You simply can't make a target exporter, release it and never look at it again. if you could, this would never be an issue.
On top of this, as I said above, unless you're a super experienced console developer, you'll need some kind of support to get through Cert. Indie devs tend not to be. Pro devs tend not to be. Only people that port games for a living, and have done so over and over, tend to be. So again, this "support" has to be paid for, we can't have our devs spending days or weeks sometimes helping developers and not getting on with their own work. It has to be paid for.
For indies to have a great game, there are many publishers out there that will shoulder this cost - and perhaps even port it for you, in exchange for a different cut.
Lastly, GMS2 "should" be able to import your 1.4 game and run. In order to get the best from it, you should update and use the new APIs, but it should import and run as-is. What we've been telling developers is if you have a game ready now, release it in 1.4 then upgrade right after. If you're releasing next year, you should consider upgrading prior to that. There is a year left on 1.x - or a little more depending on SDK upgrades, and aside from Vita (which none of us really like losing, but it's just not worth it in the GMS2 time frame), you can port afterwards.
I also don't think it should take "12 months" for a game to be ported from PC to console. Sure if your ONLY making a console game, then yeah. But most indies don't. They make mobile or desktop games and port to console. This should be a much quicker process, so a years license should be fine. And yes, the industry moves quickly - after the 8bit era, it always has. Each generation gets about 4 or 5 years - that's just the way it works.