No, like I said I'm not yet into it that much. I'm trying to understand it though. To be honest, I didn't even know the page existed. Thanks for pointing it out. I put a suggestion in the discussion page to add a link on the main page under community participation.
This is also looks interesting: https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Release_Template
Also look on related pages for older releases for the links in the RC1 announcement.
Such moments are for all major points, the initial fixes release branch, the branch of a RC, the building of the releases. It's these that cause the holdups.
What do you mean by feedback loop? The several testing phases mentioned here?
To make the decision to start executing the various routine options, like the "release template". Points 3,5,10 etc are all consensus points.
Where are the problems exactly? Is there anything someone new could help?
Yes and no. You can't really speed this up, since most issues are limited by knowledge that only a few people have.
BUT one of the big problems is that these people ALSO have to dive into the current status of many issues etc when they go into "release mode".
Having trusted lieutenants that keep an eye on certain subdomains of the project helps tremendously here. And not just there. As said Lacak (and before him Joost) have proven this for e.g. the database libraries.
Such lieutenants simply follow every development across all branches related to their subject and are aware of issues, bugs in previous releases etc. The project has grown immensely and it is sometimes hard for one person to keep overview. It is a much lighter workload than become (hard)core developers, but it is still a very valuable role.
The gap between users and (core) developers is simply too large, and to change anything, that needs to be bridged with inbetween people.
What I meant with transparent in my other post is for example a page like this. https://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/development/roadmap.html?highlight=release#release-schedule
I know there are more developers for QGIS and they have a lot more releases per year but that it is not the point.
Do they do binary releases and support them? Or do they leave that to 3rd party builders?
And compilers are particularly painful because a small bug can make a release worthless. To give you a perspective on that,
FPC 3.0.0 was the FIRST .0 release in history that Lazarus adopted, until then they chose to stay with the stable old, and all FPC release managers felt they had done a lot of work in vain.