For example, if DirectX is broken for 3 consecutive releases, I would expect the people doing the release to label the old 'working' version and branch from there if any bugs fixes are needed.
Things in wine break all the time, users know it and are used to it, if d3d8 breaks for 3 releases, people will just use an old version until things are fixed. Many people stayed at wine-20031212 for months because of regressions that weren't fixed for a few months, but people just kept wine-20031212 and were happy. With alpha software this is quite normal.
Ivan.