1 - Unabashedly, our #1 commitment is to our customers who are relying on Couchbase for their mission critical applications. That's why the Couchbase Enterprise Edition gets the bulk of our attention and testing.
2 - History can show that's it's actually more like 3-6 months of delay rather that 8-10 and corresponds more to our release cycles than to an artificially imposed delay.
3 - Couchbase major releases has always had CE and EE in sync.
4 - Couchbase CE is provided as a service to the community. Users who want to rely upon their own expertise to run a database in production have a responsibility to themselves and their organization to have the appropriate level of skills to do so. That should mean being able to debug and fix bugs themselves. In fact, our open source code base does not lag AT ALL and anyone is welcome to build off of that themselves and get all of the latest and greatest features (and bugs of course). If they're not willing to do this, they should be paying us to.