I've felt like the gap became smaller, either stuff isn't changing so fast anymore, or I just got lucky and only dealt with things that had good backwards compa

I've felt like the gap became smaller, either stuff isn't changing so fast anymore, or I just got lucky and only dealt with things that had good backwards compatibility. Either way I'm usually always switching to testing about half a year before it becomes stable. It usually already is pretty stable at that point, and if I do encounter an issue I like to report it to give a little bit back, to help make the next stable release a little more stable from the start. :-)