It's turned out that Jaspert was correct. The next release of Debian has been delayed because developers have stayed away from working on Debian because of their objections to two of the developers being paid.

As Barth wrote, “So, looking at the status changes during the time I spent full-time on release issues I think it worked well. Of course, not everything is perfect, but there is a clear improvement. On the other hand, there was a large disadvantage of the whole experiment.”

Update: There are media rumours floating around that “[Etch has] been delayed because some developers have deliberately slowed down their work”. This doesn't reflect what I said.

That sometimes journalists have obvious reading problems, well, isn't a too new thing. One has to deal with that, e.g. by appending more text to the cited blog entry.

If someone inside the Debian community fails for the same is way more disappointing for me. I have never stated that “[I] couldn't compensate this” – that is just totally wrong. I think that dunc-tank helped us with release of Etch, but the help could have been greater if some people wouldn't behave as childish as they do. And I also try to look both ways, and not be singled-minded about it.