I agree that regular hotfix releases should exists.
When I say hotfix, I don't really mean bugfix release. I mean release that fixes those issues that were introduced in the last release only. And only those issues, for which fix is very well understood and the confidence level is very high.
There is not many such issues.
Since 1.3.0, there were exactly 3 commits like that: https://github.com/thirtybees/thirtybees/compare/1.3.0...1.3.x , four lines in total.
Why not include other bugfixes into such release as well? Well, because it comes with potential of creating more problems, mostly because of the non-linearity of the codebase. Even if the fix/commit seems safe, it might not be safe for cherry-picking to different branch. For example, imagine this one line fix in main branch
$price = (float)Tools::getValue('price');
to
$price = Tools::getNumberValue('price');
On the first glance, it looks quite safe to cherry pick and transfer this commit from main to bugfix branch. After all, it's but single line. But it is never so simple. In this case, the getNumberValue method was introduced only recently into main branch. If we transfer this code without the commit that introduced the 'getNumberValue' method, it would break.
Problem with official releases is that it takes a lot of time. Like 8 hours of mundane manual work. Of course, we could automate this. But to automate this we would need a lot of time as well. But until this is automated, there will be just a few releases.
As a workaround for the time being, I plan to introduce third channel into 'core updater'. Currently we have 'Stable' and 'Bleeding Edge', but soon we will have 'Stable', 'Stable with hotfixes', and 'Bleeding edge'. Please suggest better name for the new channel 🙂