Another weekend and I've got the chance to ship some software that's been pending for a while. It turns out that most of the main changes that went into Rasqal RDF Query Library 0.9.7 and Redland RDF Language Bindings 1.0.0.2 were asked for by users who hang out on the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC channel (#swig on irc.freenode.net).
However, taking a wider Free Software / Open Source community view, it's the user's requirements that should drive development otherwise you can tend to wander off into the interesting development weeds or get into premature optimisation. Of course, user-submitted patches also gives a good direction kick, and I got some this time too for both of the these packages - thanks Steve H and Dave V.