@Viper007Bond - Sure, anybody could try backporting patches, filing a ticket, and nudging a committer. In some cases, that process works. A few versions back, I contributed a patch to let us mass-reenable plugins after deactivation, argued my use-case, and got it committed -- a couple of versions later. But stuff like that was much faster and easier when I had direct commit access :)

But I think people want the reassurance of "officially committed support". They want a black-and-white public statement that there will be "support" for a given version (at least in terms of bug/security fixes), and that a process is in place to ensure that it happens in a reasonable way.

The reason for suggesting additional committers is to address the "extra workload" that such backporting might theoretically generate. In cases where the current-branch patch applies cleanly to the previous-branch, the extra work is pretty light. But in cases where the code involved changed too much between versions, it seems like having some extra help dedicated to the previous-branch work would be a boon.

And note that I didn't ask the core devs to simply do more work -- I volunteered to step up and help. My free-time is pretty minimal, but I'm not suggesting anything that I'm not willing to help out with, if possible.