Let me give some reasons as to why you'd want to release more often than you do today:
a) bugfixes take a very long time to reach mainstream, frustrating users; this is one of the many commits I've yet to see in official releases: link; currently, this is the main reason M2 gets on the bad side of people;
b) because of the above, there's a continuous pressure from us - the users -, to actually ship the bugfixes; that can't be good for your health, M2 core devs;
c) new features take a long time to release, making the userbase move to friggin' WP-Commerce, because boredom;
d) such long release cycles means that a big amount of code is added to the mainline at once, which makes for a very unstable/dangerous upgrade process every. blasted. time; I've yet to see the developer who can't wait to upgrade the M2 codebase of an ongoing project;
e) everybody's doing it, and it works for them (from the Linux kernel, to the main browsers); I'm sure it can work for M2, as well.
You've been improving, merging more community PRs. Great. But can you please release them, too?
PS: Ending on a fun note, this is the worst forum app I've seen lately. 