Sweet, 1.9 prerelease sounds smart. I'm not entirely happy to see 1.10 being YET MORE ADVENTURE UPDATE, but hey, they've probably got good reasons for it. I suspect part of it's definitely being motivated by the fact that the 1.8 prerelease was such a huge success - going by some of Mojang's twitter responses, they even saw a sales boost during it, which is just sort of crazy.
And yeah, I'm gonna join the "Can we tone the bitching down, for the love of all things large and monstrous and cuddly?". Common guys, this is what killed the original thread for smart discourse. If you've got complaints, that's cool, that's fine. But try and keep them reasoned, not just "evelentyoneoneone!" style things - that's simply not helpful.
Edit: Let me just quote Notch's latest tweet.
Notch:
The reason we're releasing stuff so closely now is a push before the release in November! Server admins and modders, have patience. ;)
So, in otherwords: They know it's playing hob for the modders and the admins. They also know they've got a set release date, and they'd like to have the game at a point where they're happy to say it's offically released (as silly or not as that particular statement may be). Frustrating for us players? Sure, if you're into mods like Redpower or BTW that need a significant amount of time to update properly when an update rolls out.
But i really think that complaining that the game's actually officially trying to leave beta is... a bit sad, yeah?