I have to agree with Brian a little bit. When 4.9.1 came out, I was honestly surprised to see new features added (Dashboard). They weren't major, but for a release that (I thought) was only to patch bugs, it wasn't what I expected to see.
I also agree that communication should have been better on the corp side. As a long-time community member, we've known that the corp has been doing christmas-ish releases for a while now so we pretty much knew when to expect the release, however, it would have been good to see a "If no more bugs get reported, this is what 5.0 is going to be" version. But hey, that's something you live and learn with and I expect that with the problems they've had with 4.9.1 on this site, they won't be making that decision again.
With DotNetNuke Corp's recent VC investment, I am really looking forward to seeing how things in 2009 are handled. I expect that we'll start to see a lot more similarities between how the corp handles things and how other software development companies handle things. I think that in 2009 it will not be unreasonable to see DotNetNuke Corp hiring a full Q/A team as well as offering "Go-Live" licenses and such. I think that this last series of releases will be one of the last things that we see the "old corp" do. Once the "new corp" is fully in place, I expect that we'll see a lot of very good changes in how things are handled.
Even though there were some issues with 5.0.0 and 4.9.1, I say congrats to the corp for getting it out. I'm very excited that 5.0.0 has now become a real release that will start having real customers using it.