According to Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers behind WordPress has announced that the Automattic Dev team is considering a change to the WordPress.org development cycle.

We are considering building this extra time over the holidays into our roadmap. This would mean one less release per year. We’d release in Spring, Summer, and Fall, and then again in Spring of the following year. With six months of development time, the Spring release would contain the bigger features that don’t fit into the shorter Summer and Fall release windows.

I’m actually hoping that they go through with this decision. I’m thinking that the extra development time will help to decrease the amount of bugs in the Trac. You know, those pesky things that are more of a nuisance than an actual bug. This dev period would also give individuals more time to CATCH UP. You shouldn’t be far behind as far as versions go anyways, but the extra time could be beneficial.