And maybe we need to think of a way to further mitigate this crush of last minute commits. e.g. In the last week, you can't have more feature commits, or more lines of insertions in your commits, than you did in the prior 3 weeks combined. I don't know. I think this mad rush of last-minute commits is bad for the project.
I think some part of this rush of commits could also be explained as a form of entrainment[1]. Only patches reasonably close to commit will get picked up with extra attention to get them ready before the deadline. After the release hammer drops, the pool of remaining patches will have few patches close to commit remaining. And to make matters worse the attention of working on them will be spread thinner. When repeated, this pattern can be self reinforcing.
If this hypothesis is true, maybe some forces could be introduced to counteract this natural tendency. I don't have any bright ideas on how exactly yet.
Ants
[1] Emergent synchronization of interacting oscillators, see: