I agree. If the author himself is telling people it's not ready for production, it doesn't really matter what bugs this code has, unless it affects other subsys

I agree. If the author himself is telling people it's not ready for production, it doesn't really matter what bugs this code has, unless it affects other subsystems or is a dangerous regression from the previous stable release. If the bug it's fixing was already in the current release branch, wasn't noticed before and has only shown up now late in the stable branch lifetime, then it definitely doesn't seem like something that needs an urgent fix.