That was proposed (with a numeric suffix rather than letter), but rejected because we often would do 3 to 5 in a day, and somebody decided that would still leak

That was proposed (with a numeric suffix rather than letter), but rejected because we often would do 3 to 5 in a day, and somebody decided that would still leak too much information about our hotfix workflow. Another aspect would be that hotfixes would sometimes go several days between packaging and deployment (for all your usual megacorp red-tapey risk-aversey reasons), and we didn't want to explain to clients why 20120214 wasn't deployed until 2012-02-21.