Andrew,
The reason we took the decision to no longer support 0710, is that it IS not possible to maintain a community process for what has become in essence two different systems.
You do not have the same problems we do. You TIGHTLY control your system's software compliment, and fail to mention that to people reading this thread.
0710 had an upgrade system that was unrealistic to support because it simply took over and diverted the entire dpkg system for its own needs. When your user base is possibly modifying their system adding packages for their own use, this becomes a dangerous issue. But you know this, already! This was discussed at length when we took over.
We also had to make some hard decisions relating to sqlCVS. There were a lot of unanswered questions as to what changes aaron.b had made to sqlCVS post 0710's release. We did not know about MCV, nor about many of the other things that would come to light from investigation in the coming months, so we had to dig down, and learn the ENTIRE build system ourselves, I thank Zaerc for rolling the ball on this one as long as he did, because he got us to the point where we could actually do the real work, but I digress...
We had to fork the code base, and the sqlCVS master so that we could move forward, learn the entire system, and keep moving forward on porting this thing, while improving the system. Once we completely disabled the update mechanisms, and made the system upgradeable via upstream packages for core things (again, thanks to Zaerc and posde), we decided to make this branch of code the HEAD after this release. The port to 0910 will be much faster, now that we know what is going on.
Also, you mention this is not that big of a deal. It's not, but we had to learn the whole process, across every platform. It ISN'T a big deal for you, because uplink works for you. For those who don't know, uplink is Radu Cristecu, who formerly worked on both PlutoHome and LinuxMCE. We don't have ex-employees to help us through the rough spots.
-Thom