Sometimes you just need a feature before it's available in a released version. You can either go get the dev version or bitch about it. I tend to do the former.

In fact, I use quite a lot of software from their development repositories, e.g. GCC and Blender. It is a very rare occasion that I come by a bug as most open source projects have sane version management practices and branching processes.

It is extremely meaningful if you, you know, actually consider the context of this thread -- which is not someone telling an artist to use GIMP, but a discussion of "fixing up" the program.