+1000 We did this (at a much smaller scale) with Apache HBase (starting at 0.94, which I release-managed). We went to a monthly release cadence. We saw the fr

+1000 We did this (at a much smaller scale) with Apache HBase (starting at 0.94, which I release-managed). We went to a monthly release cadence. We saw the frantic last minute commits just before a release (and followed by multiple smaller releases just after the big release to stabilize the code base) essentially vanish. If the feature wasn't done, it simply got in a month later. For us it required an "transitive compatibility" (i.e. one can go from version X to version X+3 without upgrading to X+1 and X+2 first), and stable functional tests, so that confidence in a release is automatic and does not need to be established manually.