NOOOOO....
Don't constantly think you are being attacked! It was just an example, and I was refering to our own development process, which hasn't matured with the growth of the team and the number of images.
Normally, you develop in a "develop - staging - production" cycle, with QA procedures at every step, usually unit tests between develop and staging, and integration and functionality tests between staging and production. We come from an environment where there is only develop, which is also production, and no QA is done anywhere. A single codebase, and either it compiles or not.
We want to get rid of that old environment and old way of working. We are now in the problematic position where the old environment is still used, while the new one is being setup.
Now we are in a situation where we have two codebases we need to maintain, which is a nightmare. So we've decided to freeze the old environment (apart from emergency fixes), and work on getting the new one up and running, so we can move forward again.
p.s. I've started as a developer in the early 80's, and been a systems analist, project leader, teamleader, project manager and project owner in the next 30 years. 
As to your main question:
We are very aware of issues like this. I can not recall the first time it was reported, but I can only imagine that at that time we thought that we were close enough to the next release to wait for that instead of spending time fixing an old codebase. As Erik mentioned before, we've worked very hard over the last months to try to get develop stable, and chase manufacturers to fix their BSP problems. Which meant that we've spend less time on the old codebase.
p.s. This is not meant as some sort of excuse, but only just a statement of fact. We are at least as disappointed as you with the rate at which we can move on to the next release. I can only say that we spend every second of our spare time on it.
