You are correct. I will try to address incorporating patches between the beta and final release. I will not be making any more changes before the beta release, which will hopefully be in early January. Too much other stuff to do between now and the end of the year for me and others whose help I require.
I know there are many outstanding issues that people would like resolved, but my priority is to get a release process in place and get the existing fixes and improvements into peoples hands to show that the project is not dead.
Rest assured, some of those issues will be resolved before the final release, and contributed patches make for low hanging fruit .