As Sean Michael Kerner puts it on his blog, Mark Shuttleworth's "The Art of Release".. erm... "vision"/wish/dream/strategy is nether a good nor a realistic thing.

Shuttleworth's "vision" just won't work. You can't force 10-20 big upstream projects (KDE, GNOME, kernel, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, GCC, etc...) to sync their release schedule. And you wouldn't want to do that either. One of the reasons why FOSS is usually better in terms of quality is that releases, focus and features are typically driven by quality, by developers, not by marketing and competitors. Things are released when they're ready, when the maintainer thinks it's good enough.

Having a synched release plan for many large and complex projects means a huge burden on upstream.

I can't imagine Mark Shuttleworth could be that clueless about the reality of software development and how the whole ecosystem around a distribution actually works. He isn't. Can't be. So what agenda is he having/endorsing when he pushes that idea so loudly (arguably, even when he whispers, it does make a lot of noise ) ? I don't know. Except, maybe, because Canonical doesn't have much developers working directly on upstream projects that aren't 100% Ubuntu specific (at least compared to Fedora and openSUSE) and hence they're not really in a position to push for certain things to be fixed before others. Well, just thinking out loud, maybe there's no hidden motivation behind it at all.

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