I wonder if development has actually accelerated, or if this is just a change in the approach to the release/versioning process
Both.
Development has increased, but you should use your comparison from the last 2.6 release.
It stayed on 2.6.y for 8 years - that was where it got stable enough that there wasn’t some major milestone to use as a new marker for its update number
There are cool new features, but if it followed the old versioning scheme, we’d still be on 2.6 because it hasn’t (intentionally) broken the API between the kernel and userspace
Both.
Development has increased, but you should use your comparison from the last 2.6 release.
It stayed on 2.6.y for 8 years - that was where it got stable enough that there wasn’t some major milestone to use as a new marker for its update number
There are cool new features, but if it followed the old versioning scheme, we’d still be on 2.6 because it hasn’t (intentionally) broken the API between the kernel and userspace