I agree that hacking and patching are not tidy or desirable solutions for long term development, they are just a quick fix, nothing more.
Hopefully kickstart development can catch up with what 3.9 offered and grow from there. Because right now it is a little poor in that area, so we are still better of with the hacks&patches from 3.9 and third parties, which is not the ideal solution.
I also wonder why didnt Olsen integrate his Roadshow TCP stack with this release, as it could have made the update much more interesting, and I guess many people could have happily agreed to even pay a bit more for the workbench disks if it was included/added to them. After all, Roadshow is also the TCP stack of OS4, so I guess negotiations with Hyperion would have been pretty easy to acomplish since they have been already done for the OS4 version.
Furthermore, there is a lot of 68k material from Hyperion that could have been included to enrich this release, at no cost of development at all. It was just a matter of collecting it from OS4 releases and prereleases.