The official release of Drupal 5.0 is just around the corner. [According to this and this.] The cycle time is looking to be shorter than it was for 4.7. I was itching to play with it since Beta 1 was released 2 months ago, but it is just impossible without a working version of Akismet module. This site gets around 30 spam comments a day. The first Akismet development snapshot for Drupal 5 was release the night of the first day of 2007, and that’s the night I upgraded. The experience had been very pleasant:

• New installation is very easy now. Upgrade is as easy as in 4.7.
• Modules get updated to DRUPAL-5 very quickly. My guess is peoples are excited about the major numeric change in years. Drupal 4.0 was released in year 2002!
• Many nice new modules were also released. High on my list are Release Monitor | Double Click | A working Flickr module | Upload Preview | Autosave
• The new admin interface needs some getting used to, but it is a major improvement.
• The new default theme, Garland, will be good for Drupal. (controversy aside) Bluemarine was butt ugly. It just turned peoples off.