i don't know if this has been suggested before. if it has, i apologize fpr not searching.
can a mozilla style update system be used for firmware updates?
firefox has an official release of version 1.0 then a 1.1 beta which came out recently. there are also nightly builds of fennec, which is at 2.0 right now.
could nokia adopt a system where pr 1.0 could be the official release and pr 1.1 would be the official beta while nightly builds could be made available. for instance the leaked pr 1.2 could be a nightly build.

the plain old n00b could stick with 1.0 and wait for an official 2.0 or something to come out.
the slightly adventurous ones could go to 1.1
while the "on the edge" and developers could use the nightly build.

that could please all parties

Probably wishful thinking from you but probably this is closed one:
http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._packages-002/
"Posted on 2009-12-03 11:49 UTC by Ville Reijonen. Status: Under consideration,"
I would not be surprised if most of brainstorm are just hanging there like someone cares :|

I think that they will probably do it except that not with maemo. They have restarted whole thing with meego and probably now there is only small team of monkeys doing helluva job on fixing bugs on maemo5/n900. I would not expect that there is no more than one FW update after 1.2 and then they will probably change completely to meego.

btw. What do you think? Maemo has been around quite awhile and look how slowly they have adopted working methods from open source/community. Now suddenly they are yelling that everything is going to change with meego but i would take that with huge pile of salt and hint of cynicism.