Yes, the vBulletin philosophy is wrong, that's why I don't use vBulletin
phpBB, on the other hand, an opensource project, that does not make money from the people who use their software.
If we set aside the fact that there are always problems popping up with phpBB
whenever a bug is made public and fixed, the modifications are posted to the forum (as they are here), a new archive is created (as it's done here) and the version number is incremented to indicate that something has changed.
I admire your reasons for patching and allowing the new fixed versions to get out there as quickly as possible, I can totally understand the way you do things and why. But it'd just be nice for it to be a little easier to distinguish what version (and which revision of that version) you're actually running.
I posted two bugs on October 3rd, which are apparently fixed if you download 5.2 right now, but there's no mention of it being updated since 9/29 on the download page - which gives all those people who downloaded pre-bugfixes no indication that their copy still has bugs/typos/whatever - and nothing in the changelog.