Thanks @JeffSchering
Appreciate the feedback.
While I can see where you're coming from on long term releases, it's probably a different discussion. Right now we keep things simple and ask everyone to upgrade to the latest release, or security update release, which include security updates.
Good point on upgrade latency. That wasn't on the list, but we'll add an update.
All things being equal, going to 6 releases a year from 12 releases would only improve upgrade latency. We have download metrics, but they're complicated because of Docker, Puppet, Chef, Ansible and other community installers and we'll probably share that in a separate update after we have time to parse things out.
Regarding talking to the community about upgrade latency, that makes sense too--most active community members are upgrading every release, there are a few that are happy with older versions. We really haven't done a lot of research into folks that are on older builds (they're also harder to reach, if they're not active in our community).
We might want to put out a survey some time on our blog... or maybe offer a survey link in the product's About Page... (though we'd need to think about whether to support different languages).
Just curious, what's your personal experience with upgrades? Feedback highly appreciated.