Pragmatists, who know that "stable" and "unstable" branch are just tags, and what's important is the actual stability of the software in each as it relates to their use case.

People that have identified leaks affecting them which are fixed on the nightlies?

People trading some known bugs for a whole heap of new ones, ones likely to change all the time? Doesn't sound like the smartest operations move.

Given they've gone and written stuff to automatically restart the processes under certain conditions anyway, might as well just catch the memory leak and restart, rather than gamble with "not for production use" software in production environments.

The build we're using was considered pretty safe and was performing better for us than 3.7.x - of course we aren't grabbing the new nightly constantly and plan to move to a "stable" branch soon :)

Even worse, I've been known to cherry-pick commits from different unstable branches to get a semblance of "what I need".

It's not pretty, but we do what we need to do.