It's a shame GitHub puts effort into stuff like this as opposed to actually listening to their users (e.g. "Dear GitHub"). We can infer a shift from GitHub to alternate services soon from this, unless they change.
But, I do completely agree that they've been dropping the ball lately.
Most dev shops have a whole bunch of things like this -- assorted libraries and internal tools that are 80-90% of the way to being somewhat useful to the public. It's fantastic that Github provides the time/space/expectation for employees to finish them.
Multi-version execution is an active area of research [1].
>> We can infer a shift from GitHub to alternate services soon from this, unless they change.
Nope. People are lazy. Will a lot of people write comments and all, how they are going to totally move away from github? Oh yeah, no doubt. But will they actually do it? Nah, just a few, unless github becomes as bad as source forge but I don't think it's going to happen, even then it would take some time.
Yes, yes, I am aware that migrating is just a matter of adding a new origin. That's the easy bit. But getting used to a new interface and everything, that takes much more effort and time. Writing a comment is easier (especially when tons of people are doing that around you) than changing your habits.
Even ignoring everything above, I don't really agree with the "puts effort into stuff like this as opposed to actually listening to their users" attitude. GitHub is not a one man's project. The whole company shouldn't drop everything just to do something right now because it was trending on HN a week or two ago. A company like this (making substantial product changes rather urgently based on some hype) maybe sounds cool but, in reality, you would probably not be excited to use their products. Urgent changes in features and quality often does not go together.