Perhaps we should stop having major discussions when things come out as release candidates, so that we can have the major discussion on actual release? I don't know. Trying to make it work that way might just cause more problems.
I for one missed the rc1 post appearing here - as I think a number of other people did too judging from the comments and the interest gauged from the upvotes. Would a potential consideration be to attach the release-candidate discussion threads into the main release discussion, or would that cause more confusion than it's worth?
Perhaps we should stop having major discussions when things come out as release candidates, so that we can have the major discussion on actual release? I don't know. Trying to make it work that way might just cause more problems.