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Strangely enough, the only people that ever request that calibre be released less frequently are the relatively technically proficient users. Most "ordinary" users that I hear from love the fact that calibre is released so frequently. Apparently they feel that someone cares. It seems that we geeks have a slightly distorted picture of what the ordinary user wants. I often get notes from people who send donations and many of those notes mention how appreciative people are of the frequent updates.
My philosophy with updates is to never release an update that could cause data loss without a beta first. Regressions in features that affect limited functionality on the other hand are acceptable, and quickly fixed.
About 60% of downloads (about 80000) of every calibre release are people installing calibre for the first time, given that there are currently 3 million calibre installs, a million of whom have started the calibre GUI at least once in the last 3 months. So I'm not convinced that ordinary users download new releases all the time.
As toddos pointed out, calibre is *vast*. Don't be fooled by the regression lists. It's relatively rare that a regression is very serious or affects a large fraction of users. And in such cases an update is usually released the next day. And that means that about 5k people are affected by the regression.
And I have to agree with chaley. In my experience, betas never have enough coverage to catch all regressions. So I don't see how to run a successful beta program.
Finally, to those people that suggest having updates advertised only every N releases. IMO that would be counter productive. Imagine you are on a release that has regressions, you will now have to wait N weeks instead of 1 week or 1 day for the fix. The point is that for regressions to be found and identified, large uptake is needed, and if update notifications are delayed, the fixes will be delayed and finding the regressions will also be delayed.
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