Nothing about OP’s question indicated they were interested to know if there was a regular release schedule. Specifically they asked for the next release, therefore I tried to explain why there may not be a simple answer to their question.

Software development takes time and has many unanticipated challenges that makes time estimation difficult. When developers do provide estimates users, managers etc then get stroppy when they slip by.

Therefore the best strategy is just to ignore requests for time schedules because it’s a no win situation.

159 sq km vs 172 sq km really isn’t much of a difference. How is it news worthy?

Karma might work on a per instance basis, but if implemented on a federation wide scale you’d have to trust every instance. It would be far too easy to artificially increase your karma with your own rogue instance just by editing the database.