To me, the "greatest bug of all" is the broken gameplay (I "can't" play the game if I don't want to), so I could definitely do without these intermediate releases if it meant a quicker timetable for version 1.1.
But yes, I can understand if other people want general fixes first. I'll just wait patiently
It's hard to fix gameplay when people are having technical issues. These changes will make fixing gameplay easier.
And count me in among the crowd that says locking the journals doesn't accomplish anything. The best policy would be a liberal staking policy for the dev journals- you start flaming in there, you're banned from the dev journals, if not the forum.
Also, feedback/questions are the point of the comments in dev journals. One thing that does is if Brad has a bad idea- we can't collectively go "no Brad no"- having it in the general forums gets it filtered out.