Wow… congrats on your courage. 
I had exactly the same “planning” in mind (no kiddin’) but being so far away from what Tow had in mind, I was afraid to say it. 
I guess that due to my professional background (Sociology) I tend to go directly for the compromise solution, which is what I tried to do in my post above. In my head that’s cutting through all the bargaining to a solution that would reasonably satisfy everyone, to save time. In reality though, it probably is just a bad bargaining start from my side. 
When I heard not even 0.75 was in the plans, it was a bit of a bummer, as I was expecting/hoping we’ll get at least as far as 0.77. I don’t like to rush to high numbers, as you never know what unforeseen issues you might run into, that would require more time and releases than expected. And then you end up like WoG, adding letters behind your numbers - and then even run out of those, if you decide that “f=final”, so you have a “script update” which brings quite some changes, but you can’t give it a number code, 'cause 3.58f was supposed to be the last, leading maybe to a bit of extra confusions - at least among the players who didn’t follow the project close enough.
I’d rather have 0.75, 0.76,… until 0.79, instead of 0.74d, …e, …f. I can’t say why - maybe it feels more elegant. I’d also prefer a release on the 1st of every month (with a dev release 1 week before). But I’m not one of the coders in this project, to realize the amount of work that would be necessary for that. It’s a voluntary project and I realize that pushing too much for what I want might have the opposite effect on the developers. A release every 2 months (with a dev version 2 weeks before), seemed like an elegant decent compromise. We might have been on schedule if it wouldn’t have been for an unfortunate technical issue, but I’d rather stick to the schedule and motivate the low amount of new features with that, then delay with 1 more month because of the same reason.
And another thing. I suspect that from a dev’s perspective, who is better aware of the amount of work and changes from one release to another in the past, it feels uncomfortable to have at some point a release which doesn’t change even half of how much previous releases changed. From a testers perspective however (and I don’t know if I speak for everyone, but at least for a few), if it wouldn’t have been for this discussion, I wouldn’t have had at all the feeling of a “half-release”. Anyway previous releases had so many new features, that I never had the patience to go through all of them in my testing. If we’d have only 10 new features and 40 fixes per release, it would be easier to go through all of them. But we’ve had changelogs with almost 100 items. I’ve tried a few times to go systematically through all of them for proper testing, but never managed to get to the end of the list (barely to the half). What I see now on Mantis is 104 resolved reports. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that we have more than enough to put in the Changelog of a new release and that the general public will probably not perceive the release in a negative way, because most of them are not actually keeping track of the amount of new features that come with each release. Though, if there are lurkers who think otherwise - please don’t hesitate to share your opinion. 
So there it was, a more honest answer from my side, leaving all compromise attempts aside (as far from the reality as it may be).
Actually being able to access the Main Menu from the game (to Load or start New game), it’s already a huge step (could be top of the list in the Changelog). Making the “Load” button working it’s just fine tuning which can easily wait IMO. I even see a small positive side to it, that is the fact that we’re “forced” to go through the Main Menu to load, to have this path tested as well. Because otherwise 99% of the time we’d just use “Load” and risk to not notice a possible bug with the longer path.
