In reply to KTS915.

and your “right channels” for non-developers like me exist only for us to give feedback on things you’ve already decided to implement.

This is not true. The make core blogs are where people publish their feature plugin merge proposals. It's these specific posts that allow you to give feedback before something is approved and implemented in WordPress. In addition to the merge proposal posts, they're discussed in the weekly WordPress developer chats held on Wednesdays where you can chime in on the proposal along with core developers. These feedback opportunities all exist prior to things like feature plugins being implemented.

As for other things in core, I've learned by now that WordPress development by committee would likely result in a slow pace of development or no development at all.

In other words, you don’t have anywhere that I can say “Please — just stop!” and have that receive anything more than short shrift. Yet respect works both ways, you know.

What is it that you want to happen if you leave that type of comment on a merge proposal post? Your voice and opinion is not the one that rules the land, it's part of a larger pool of voices. Are you expecting the core team to just stop what they're doing because you said so?

If WordPress did not push out security updates, it would be a disrespectful position to put everyone in. We know that at least three major updates to WordPress are released a year. The amount of point releases to fix bugs or security issues varies. However, ultimately it's your responsibility to ensure that nothing will break and you do the appropriate amount of testing to make sure the upgrade goes as smooth as possible. I will say though, WordPress does have a small history of updates breaking things that are out of the user's control but they're more of an anomaly than common place.