It's a little disheartening to see people pay so much attention to a fictitious number, which really has no regard to the actual state of the code/project. Whether v1.0 or v0.1 was used, the quality of the release would not differ any.
It's also a matter of how much cognitive load you want to impose on your users. We use dozens of different open-source packeages, each with its own version number. Can you really expect us to keep track of all of them? "Which Linux ZFS release was the first stable one?" "Uh, I think it was 0.6 something, or maybe 0.5.1?"
Don't do that to your users. Call it 1.0.0.
Exactly. To those who have been using 0.6.0_rc*, version 0.6.1 conveys the meaning "go ahead and upgrade, here's the stable release with no backward compatibility issue".
You will get your version 1.0 after several pre-1.0 RC releases. That's the proper release management.
So, rather than adapt to people everywhere and call it v1.0, let's be a little sad that calling it 0.6.1 doesn't have the same effect, and then leave it the way that it is, and complain about how irrational people are?
Or...
I know, let's make a new release of v0.6.1 called...wait for it...v1.0. And then we can move on to real issues, not fake controversy.
The adage "pick your battles" comes to mind....