In a certain way wine has always been a beta version and will stay for some time. For a future stable release, say wine 1.6, a quality criterion should be the ability to run all userland apps designed for Windows XP and before (apart from Win16, DOS, drivers and other hardware related or system related stuff like defragmentation tools). The idea behind would be to get a solid basis, i.e. you can say, everything designed for WinXP&earlier will run for the average user without issues. Wine is slowly moving into that direction, on the other hand there are lots of smaller regressions and people want to run the most bleeding edge MS Offices and IEs, a lot of contributions from CodeWeavers are devoted to them. From a conceptual perspective I'd argue, get WinXP and the older stuff right, before you move on to Windows 7 and IE9, but most of the development is driven and paid by Codeweavers, and it is perfectly legitimate for them to concentrate their effort on what their users want to see running. Imagine Codeweavers closing all the old gaps first, but going bancrupt, because the users wanted to run Office 2010 first, then they could say, "Hey, we did it conceptually right, what went wrong?". That is of course not what I'd want to live to see. And don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the progress that was made with DIB engine, .NET and even USB drivers, the prospect of seeing all that stuff run flawlessly is awesome.
