Exactly. There's no urgency, so I really don't understand why the urgency to ram through a proposal with any risk attached with the excuse that nothing will get done otherwise? Gavin?
It is completely artificial urgency, so a decision is reached and implemented in a reasonable amount of time.
When I set the deadline, I had no idea Luke would:
a) Decide that a bugfix 0.5.2 release was a good idea. I thought the minor bugfixes weren't worth taking the time to make a release but arguing with Luke is like arguing with a brick wall, so I went "meh, whatever."
b) Propose BIP 17 and go on a war against BIP 16.
Both of those distracted from implementation and testing of BIP 16.
But what's past is past, the question is what do do from here; I'm planning on starting that discussion in the Dev&Tech forum tomorrow.
PS: RE: risk: the risks of either proposal to the overall health of the bitcoin network are small.