It still feels like this has everything to do with it—this is exactly what semantic versioning is about. Everyone expects a jump from 7 to 8 to signal a major change, and that expectation forces us (devs) to accumulate features instead of releasing them as soon as they’re ready.
What if we decided to release a major version tomorrow? Would it even include that many major changes? Not unless we had intentionally held back features to make it feel substantial. But since we’ve been rolling out improvements in dot releases, there wouldn’t be much left to justify a major jump.
This is exactly where the slowdown happens—we either delay features to make a major release feel “big” (which slows development) or we push updates continuously, making major versions feel less significant.