Hi,
FWIW, from my Tails PoV:
* I concur, it would be very helpful for us to have some better visibility on what's coming in the next TBB.
* Mike has answered us in a very kind, timely and detailed way every time we've asked him this information. Many thanks!
Also, I figured it would be good if the Tor Browser team was aware that we've been playing a kinda dangerous game lately: we are generally building our browser and ISO on the Sunday before a Firefox release is scheduled, so that we can test it on Monday, and release on Tuesday at the same time as Firefox. The rebased Tor browser patches are usually published at a time when we've already built our browser.
Until now, it has been fairly smooth and painless: the slightly older patches apply nicely on the new tree, and the resulting browser works fine. Worst case, we've missed some last-minute improvements. However, I'm a bit scared that one these days, Tails users are hit by an important problem caused by this scheduling mismatch.
I'm not expecting the Tor Browser folks to work week-ends and make our life easier, so the best we can do is possibly to go on automatizing things, so that we can reduce the time manual testing of Tails releases takes, and build our browser later.
Cheers,