[tamentis]

These decisions are often driven by marketing or product folks and rarely engineers.

The marketing team would probably even push further toward 1, 2, 3, or anything that could make a big splash once or twice a year. The product team would probably prefer dates because it makes their planning easier.

[knz42]

Engineers like calver too! (I do.) Calver tells me very clearly how old a release it and what was the technical landscape when it was released.

For example I know precisely how old ubuntu 16.04 is and what I can expect to (not) be in there.

[gtirloni]

And not much else.