i have thought that for a while.
the linux kernel is only up to 2.5 and it has been around for 13 years now, so what's the deal with the distros? most distros started at about 5 or 6 simply to get a number similar to red hat's one, SuSE's first distro was number 5 or something wasn't it? and i really knew it was the end when slackware caved in and jumped from 3.5 straight up to 7.0 simply because they were fed up with people asking them when they would upgrade to linux 7... my hat's off to the debian based distros (gnu/debian, lycoris desktop l/x, knoppix et cetera) for sticking to their guns and only being at 3.x right now. i can't stand needlessly high version numbers, i mean! emacs21.1.3? ridiculous. that's one of the reasons i uninstalled emacs and symlinked /usr/bin/emacs to /usr/bin/jove
one of the other reasons is that emacs is huge and can safely be done without when the likes of joe and jove exist.