Googler here. I agree that the old process was sub-optimal for a series of reasons. My biggest gripe was about the 6 months cutoffs was a problem for projects t

Googler here. I agree that the old process was sub-optimal for a series of reasons. My biggest gripe was about the 6 months cutoffs was a problem for projects that are 1) longer than that and 2) on the binary side of things (ie. Hard to measure partial/incremental impact so the project is either launched or still in development). I got burned by that at least twice. Now, with the yearly cycle, I hope that this will be mitigated. It's too early to draw conclusions about it, but by reading through the docs it seems a net improvement over the old way.