Because we (Heimdal) need to make a release, darn it. I'm going to cut an 8.0 beta within a week or two.

Basically, an 8.0 release is super pent up -- years. It's got lots of very necessary stuff, including support for the extended GSS-API "cred store" APIs, which are very handy. Lots of iprop enhancements, "virtual service principal namespaces", "synthetic client principals", lots of PKINIT enhancements, modern public key cryptography (but not PQ), etc.

The issue is that the maintainers (myself included) have been busy with other things. But the pressure to do a release has ramped up significantly recently.