Hello,
As far as I know, there is an RFC that defines that big PHP releases are
done once a year and EOL of previous branches are done in a manner that
there are no more than 3 branches active at any moment. If you push 5.7 and
in half a year release 5++ - you will end up with 4 paralel active branches
and that's not good. We have to rememeber that 5++ will bring a lot of
change and internal devs will have to deal with of influx of pull requests,
extension updating, deal with educating people how to not mess up while
updating the extensions for 64 bit support and so on.
As far as the version number goes - PHP 6 is fine. The mess with the
Unicode support happend a long time ago and probably is not remembered by
many :)
Arvids.