This is nothing special. Badspot's been going through multipule betas (I think the latest was 14, but I'm not a beta tester, so this is secondhand knowledge), and people have been beta testing it. There's clearly more being released with v9 than has been publically mentioned, or else it wouldn't have taken this long to get together.
As a note, I'm a big fan of devlogs and public information on development.