I don't follow; fixes making it only into -CURRENT is certainly an issue, but slowing down the major release cadence will make it take even longer for those to

I don't follow; fixes making it only into -CURRENT is certainly an issue, but slowing down the major release cadence will make it take even longer for those to reach you. Ensuring fixes make it into release branches is something we need to (and are working to) improve. If you're able, we would very much appreciate community effort in helping to merge and test bugfixes to stable branches. Supporting the FreeBSD Foundation also helps to ensure there are resources to help make this a reality. Any change to major release cadence, minor release cadence, branch lifetime, and access to new features implies a tradeoff against the others, as is clear in reading through the responses in the thread you link.