As of this writing, there were 269 committers in the project. When they commit a change to a branch, that constitutes a new release. It is very common for users in the community to track a particular branch. The immediate existence of a new release makes the changes widely available right away and allows for rapid feedback from the community. This also gives the community the response time they expect on issues that are of importance to them. This makes the community more engaged, and thus allows for more and better feedback that again spurs more maintenance and ultimately should create a better product.