I’ve found the recent thread on distribution support very interesting.

An I’m especially excited by the prospects hinted at here

#42 webchick - October 7, 2010 - 21:40

For those who haven’t read it, http://buytaert.net/8-steps-for-drupal-8 is worth a read. In it, step 6 is “Backport small changes to stable releases”. Drupal 7 is the first release we’ve been able to entertain the idea, since we have a testing framework with 25K tests and a version-specific dependency system. What the boundaries are of such changes isn’t quite defined yet, because Dries and I have kept pretty busy with, you know, getting Drupal 7 out the door. :P~