So I met Golding at Develop last week and we had a chat about stuff like this. The first thing he mentioned (which I agree with), was that locking features makes zero sense. It’s practically impossible to have all of Epics engine team focus on stability. There is no feasible way to achieve that, especially when you consider that most of the Engine team have their own specific areas to focus on and delving into other parts of the engine could create more problems than it would solve. It’s also incredibly inefficient in the long-run, because there’s no reason to fix old buggy code if you have the ability to replace it with fresh new stuff. For example, there will never be a hardening pass on Matinee, because Sequencer is in the timeline and will eventually replace it.
The second thing that mentioned was that the process for Epics releases has changed somewhat since it first started. It used to be that a release date was set and if stuff could be crammed in, it would be - hence we had a lot of hotfixes in the Early days. 4.7 was quite a bumpy release with a total of six hotfixes because it followed the same release strategy.
Since , that has changed. The combination of people requesting focuses stability and the ever-increasing bug tracker means that they now try to put a clamp on features a month or two before the intended engine release, and do some hardening on the old and new features and make sure that the amount of bugs in the goes down instead of up.
This is the right way to go, spend the majority of the time iterating on the Engine, harden it towards the release date. It hopefully also means less crunching for the engine team and more releases like 4.8, which so far has been really good (only two minor hotfixes so far, with no major issues that force anybody to wait until 4.9 or get Master, unless they want to play with new features). There is ALWAYS the option to go and fix the engine bug yourself if you really can’t wait - something you don’t get with any other engine on the market.
Obviously don’t go harassing the G for info on this, I’m just the messenger of the messenger 