Heh; just recently there were complaints that the interface upgrade was holding up all the sexy features! Can’t win!
It wasn’t just the interface upgrade.
Blender was refactored from ground up.
If there was no feature freeze during 2.5x, it would have taken it forever to get stable.
Now it’s stable, now it’s in 2.6, new feature spree is coming.
Hopefully they will get more attention soon, rather than just the sexy features
The reason modeling tools didn’t get attention is bmesh.