> ...you’re staring at a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time.

I'm not sure I understand this, for an OSS project, the only timeframes at play are self-imposed. I don't think most people would care if you pushed a release back by a week to fix some last minute bugs. /shrug