I must say I love LibreOffice, I love what they are trying to do, and I love their "stick it to the man" attitude.
However, with their rapid release cycle and parallel numbering system, it falls on the user to very thoroughly read the release notes and bug reports when downloading.
For example, they have just released 3.4.1, which is supposed to be "safely deployed for production needs by most users". However, it STILL contains several very significant bugs, including "Problems with printing table borders and pictures from Writer (workaround: PDF) (fdo#37488)" and "MS Office 2010 complains about damaged MS Office 2003/XP documents created by LibreOffice 3.4 (fdo#37516)".
So, it's possible to "upgrade" to a higher number version and have more bugs!
Also, there are still bugs that are in every version, specifically around PDF creation. I still have to use OpenOffice to create PDF forms, because LibreOffice text fields are so misaligned as to be unusable. You wouldn't know this beforehand unless you read the bug reports, because they don't list them as bugs in any release report.
Finally, this parallel branch thing is going to be problematic here, unless we want to support portablizing both branches for eternity - double work for our already overworked developers.
Let me repeat that I do love LibreOffice (and I eagerly look forward to the day that they fix the PDF rendering bugs so that I can FINALLY delete OpenOffice).
But let the buyer beware when upgrading, and please read the release notes before you do, so you don't find yourself with an inferior version that happens to have a higher number.
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