There's an assumption underneath most people's language plan, and it's rarely examined: that if you keep going, speaking will eventually turn up.
It won't. Not because you aren't doing enough, but because the activity doesn't produce it. That's a structural fact rather than a motivational one, and everything else follows from it.
What the Gap Is
Understanding and producing run on separate systems. One stores what you know about the language. The other runs automatic production, and it's the same system that handles any skill you perform without thinking.
Input fills the first. Nothing about filling the first transfers anything into the second. There's no threshold at which accumulated understanding tips over into speech.
So the gap between what you understand and what you can say isn't a stage. It's a permanent feature of doing only one kind of practice, and it stays open indefinitely.
The Evidence Is Unusually Clear
You don't have to take this on theory. Look at the people furthest along the input route.
Learners with thousands of hours of comprehensible input who still speak haltingly. Immersion students with years of exposure whose production stays limited. People who have lived in a country for a decade, understand everything said to them, and answer in their own language.
If volume of input closed the gap, none of those would exist. All of them are common.
What This Costs Per Year
Practically: another twelve months of comprehension improving and production not moving.
That isn't nothing — better comprehension is worth having. But if the thing you actually want is to speak, a year spent entirely on input delivers zero progress toward it, and you'll arrive next January in the position you're in today.
Most people have already done this several times without noticing, because input work feels like progress and technically is progress, on the other axis.
The Fix Is Specific
Production develops through production. Repeated, out loud, until it stops requiring thought.
That's the only known route, it doesn't take much time per day, and it's the one component missing from almost everybody's plan.
About Outputly
Outputly is production practice. It uses the understanding you already have and converts it into speech that arrives without assembly.