[pron]

Reducing the total cost of updates is one of the main goals of the new model. The new feature releases are just slightly more disruptive than the old feature releases, and the major releases are gone altogether. No more testing is needed for the feature releases now than was necessary for the feature releases under the old model, but in general, people were doing testing under some very wrong assumptions. Full regressions tests are necessary for a release of any kind -- including patches (in fact, the most disruptive releases in the last 2 years was 11.0.2 and 8u202). If you were lucky to get by with less testing, the change in how the feature versions are named shouldn't change matters for you. Overall, the effort required is reduced.