Your questions are topics of ongoing discussions for the whole MoveIt! maintainer team, but I'll provide my personal thoughts here.
> I assume you wont upgrade major versions in the same ROS distro, right?
This is getting trickier now that ROS1 releases are every 2 years. Software likes to develop faster than 2 year cycles, so I think we will need to come up with new release approaches outside of the ROS distro system. ROS originally was released every 6 months, which is fast enough to allow the packages to sync to the distros. I'm not sure what a good alternative is, here's some ideas:
1) Everyone builds newer releases from source, using perhaps git tags
2) We setup our own debian repositories url like Gazebo does (packages.osrfoundation.org)
3) We offer debians for direct download
I agree that we shouldn't be breaking a ROS distro except perhaps the latest one.
> So they wont have to deal with the hassles of upgrading until they also need to upgrade ROS distros.
The unfortunate consequence of this philosophy is that it requires you to do a major upgrade of your OS to simply get a newer version of a motion planning software. This is a major hurdle to do all at once, but perhaps not worth fighting.
> Do you anticipate maintaining release branches so you can potentially backport bugfixes?
We already have release branches for every version of ROS that we backport crtical fixes to, including indigo, jade, kinetic, and of course melodic.
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