This is what iteration looks like. Would you like to not have the opportunity to see smaller releases? You can look away.

We've been running 1.7.12 in production for about a week, so far it's as solid as 1.6 has been. So far I see no reason not to use the mainline.

I don't understand. This is 1.8 which is a stable release but non-breaking release.

If it were versioned 1.8.1 it'd be a mainline release which is more experimental.