Calling whatever happens to be lying around on a particular date a "stable release" is a laughably bad idea (the "rhythm method" is also lousy birth control). A "release" is something you want lots of people to use; "the stuff in version control on the first of the month" is something else entirely.

Perl releases used to take awhile -- so do releases of POSIX, HTML, C, and C++ -- and that was not a bad thing. It's the difference between a platform and a fad.