22.1 and 23.1 are bug fix releases for the previous major versions of 22.0 and 23.0. They contain bug and security fixes that were backported on top of older versions. The purpose of such releases is to allow people to still safely use older versions. Users may still wish to do so because they may still be auditing newer versions, or newer versions contain features that they are not yet comfortable with, or maybe something was deprecated and removed that they are still relying on. In these releases, very little has changed except for some bug fixes that were deemed to be important.
It was never done such for Bitcoin. So the there is real base for concerns some users about full RBF feature that developers decided to basically continue to work on older releases?
Minor releases has nothing to do with "soy milk drinking wannabe programmers cannot get even the version numbers straight". It is, in fact, a standard procedure that we do, and is a common practice in the software development industry.
Standard practice was to release 2.0 version after 1.x is abandoned and in Visual C++ 6.0 New Project menu is selected. I remember Bitcoin always had 0.xx.x versioning schema until someone dropped zero from front and we arrived from pre-1.0 versions to version 22 overnight. If this is not Firefox then what? Also some Intel fanboys decided to rename Bitcoin to Bitcoin Core. And do not tell that Bitcoin and Bitcoin are two different things. The reference implementation of Bitcoin De Facto are Bitcoin. Just like when we are talking about DC++ there is no need to separate DC++ protocol from DC++ client, even if the protocol is compatible with other clients like RevConnect or StrongDC++.
Just as an example, the Linux kernel is currently 6.1.2. But there are still releases for 5.x and 4.x kernel versions because they support older major versions. They make bug fix backports to the older versions so that users who wish to still use those older versions are not left out to dry if there are important bugs that are found.
If I want to run 2.4 or 2.6 Linux kernel versions, I take out old Slackware or Mandrake CD-ROMs and run them. Also Linux stayed on 2.4 and 2.6 kernel versions for long time. I do not remember 2.8 versions, but probably because I mostly work with embedded systems now. Even Linux kernel development now is infested with soy drinking transvestites messing up version numbers.
So where we are now? What is the bestest Bitcoin version?