I think it's best for the MTA team if 1.7 is released ASAP because the testing that has already been done to verify the stability of master is jeopardized by every new commit. Most bugs found have been fixed now, but if the changes keep coming, a new bug may end up in the official 1.7 release. Or are additional things planned for the release of 1.7? Any more backwards incompatible stuff?

Tracker of known issues introduced in 1.7 that are not yet fixed

1. [1.7] aclrequest ACL changes are lost when shutting down server #4484 - this PR just needs merging - Simplify ACL request refresh detection (improves #4409) #4483
2. Bullet sync / onPlayerWeaponFire is still broken #4497

Public beta test

I don't if anyone here was around in the old 1.1 to 1.3 days but I remember hosting public betas so that the major releases could be tested by a large audience which significantly reduces the risk of a nasty surprise after release, which is important with these backwards incompatible changes because imagine if a incompatible bug was introduced in 1.7 and 1.8 had to be released to fix it. This is kind of what happened with 1.2.

I can take care of the public beta test whenever a release candidate is made and report back any issues that came up.

I don't know if this would be possible but if "Max recommended/minclientversion: 1.6.0-9.23324.0" could be updated so that anyone who tries to join the server is asked to download the new build it'd help, but if not it's fine I should still be able to get enough people to manually install the release candidate.