It can not be a beta any more when you encourage people to build their businesses on it.

This is a very good point I don't think enough about. I don't encourage any normal users to live off steem but for the devs building dapps and various businesses starting, they essentially must.

After hf19 I thought they would bundle less major changes together so it was easier to understand what effects they had on the platform and community (as well as testing) but this one seems to change many fundamentals. It is going to be near impossible to know what has done what now which makes future planning less precise. @reggaemuffin mentioned small forks more often which should be the standard.

Luckily there aren't millions of users on hundreds of apps yet so there is still time to adjust best practices.