I had ccome to the conclusion that RunUO wasn't "really" an open source project a while back, on the grounds that it didn't really have community participation, ala any other serious open source effort. I then went thru this thought process where I considered forking the core, only to do what you just proposed. I even wrote a long vision statement. However, being old enough and wise enough to know I wouldn't really be able to follow thru on such a proposal, I never published the statement or did anything/
I can't tell you how pleased I am that RunUO has taken this next step to maturity. Very good move. Now we just have to see if the community can grow a few "trusted committers" or what not (understandably a problem around the emu community I think).
I recommend you look over the Linux approach of odd and even number releases, and how they manage that (even for stabilization and bug fixes, odd for developmental, let the downloader beware). Using such a process, you should be able to get a whole new level of validation to the releases, a lot more community involvement in the content, and so forth.
C//