mwallen,
I fully understand your position. Please leave your comments here. https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/cp/ideas/ideaList.apexp
My thoughts and my thoughts alone below:
There are 3 very unappetizing choices when releasing new hardware
1. - Put major code changes like hardware releases into GA code and take the chance that GA code is destabilized...
2. - Delay GA code (6.3.1.2) until we can release the hardware, which keeps Aruba from declaring the code GA for months and months.
3. - Start another train in parallel and ensure that the changes necessary for new hardware isolate GA code from major changes..
The safest route is #3, which isolates changes necessary for new hardware from GA code.
The chicken and the egg with GA code is that it cannot be declared GA until enough people have been using it and the majority of serious bugs are addressed. That means that new hardware is never released on GA code, because nobody has ever used it.
Aruba customers deploy Aruba code in many different combinations that are not even thought of by Aruba. It is impossible to test all of those combinations. If Aruba did, what takes months to release, would take years. Meanwhile, everyone wants features, fixes and new hardware, so at some point, some code needs to ship.
The best way to deal with this is to completely read the release notes and deploy your target version of code in a lab. You should also solicit opinions on Airheads here from other people who have done the same, so that you can crowdsource and get feedback on any strategy you want to come up with. This is highly encouraged, because we leverage the information on Airheads to improve the product and get out ahead of issues. Some people already have 6.4.1 deployed in production, so please solicit their opinions here. You can also submit your logs.tar to Aruba TAC for your production network and they can see if there are any red flags that would keep you from upgrading to 6.4.1.
You can also notify your local Aruba sales team of ideas or things you want improved.