Dear Patrtic,
... ConTeXt would probably stabilize, which IMHO is not a good thing. One thing I really love ConTeXt for is the speed new techniques are adopted (pdf features, luatex,...) One day we might have a ConTeXt MKII book for those who are afraid of swithing to pdftex2.
ConTeXt should be eventually stabilized so that someone can make some use of it. But, there is a way for rapid adopting of new techniques too. My experience of using open-source products (I'm best familiar with Moodle) suggest that there should be overlapping cycles in development: 1. Allocate new version number and start implementing new features. Many things are broken at the moment and the version becomes unusable for production purposes. 2. Stabilize this version and make definite release (number x.x.). Now it can be used for production. 3. Continue resolve bugs in this version AND perform Step 1 IN PARALLEL. Moodle follows this model and I always wandered how smooth it was to migrate between releases. Everything is completely predictable. Please, look at http://download.moodle.org/ to get the idea of their versioning. I think ConTeXt needs similar versioning model badly. Now it has rather naive model (release dates) that doesn't help in deciding about stability at all. -- Best regards, Vyatcheslav Yatskovsky