I wouldn't say I need the program to grow with more features, but at the bare minimum they should have been more diligent with cutting releases after accepting bug fixes, instead of letting those contributions langish on the main development branch out of reach for users.

I mean it would be understandable if the maintainers didn't have the time to keep working on it at all, but clearly the review work was done to accept some patches so why not make .point releases to allow the fixed code reach users via their distribution's channels?