VanMardigan
has calmed down a bit.
I don't know that it's stupid, though. They have to release the phones before Christmas. If the OS is not finished by the time they have to ship the phones to retail it makes sense to have an update ready for when people actually can buy them. What would be stupid would be to delay the release of the phones.
At the end of the day, their goal should be to get everyone on the Insider preview, or rather everyone that cares about phone updates. Have a third tier - fast, slow, official.
This doesn't make sense, you can't sell a phone with a preview OS, especially if the carriers can still delay updates for the people who buy it through them. And no, telling people to go through the process of signing up for beta updates is not the way to fix it. That works for us, but the average person will just have a phone with massive bugs and the carriers will not care. It'll be a big pr disaster, the last thing you need when you are already on a death spiral.