I think we were all just used to seeing even numbers as stable release versions. I don't think there's anything wrong with having odd number production release

I think we were all just used to seeing even numbers as stable release versions. I don't think there's anything wrong with having odd number production release versions. Also, 1.9 wasn't really an experimental place for Matz, it was initially YARV then Matz conceded it to be the next official ruby branch. None of the future VMs will/have been done by Matz. He actually joked about that during RubyConf 2007... the reason ruby VMs became fast was because Matz was taken out of the picture.