I agree with your last paragraph. Where I do my professional development, we work on software that provides (at this point) APIs that are 20 versions old, going back to 2005, along with solid documentation. Why? Because you can’t expect clients to retool everything that they have done every few months. When we get Preview Releases, they are completed and fully documented as well.
I didn’t even switch over to v5 when I noticed the various bug reports and issues coming out until the middle of this year, thinking that February was the cutoff, now I am wondering if the time investment in v5 was even worth it. While I am looking forward to Helix, I wonder how much research and planning is really done versus seat-of-the-pants development decisions.