I also wonder if we're thinking about this problem all wrong. What if
the answer isn't to increase the friction in Rawhide, but instead to
create a regular output stream that people can use to be above
releases? That's more or less how Tumbleweed works, as it's
essentially snapshotted and published from Factory when it "checks
out" via the OpenQA gate. Now, OBS has the nice ability of being able
to have granular control of how publishing actually works. I think the
way Koji's tagging mechanism works may provide a similar capability,
and we could leverage that to produce something like mattdm's
oft-wanted "Fedora Bikeshed".

I for one don't actually want Rawhide to be gated because it makes
things much harder in terms of properly developing new features. We're
simply not capable of being as good as OpenSUSE in terms of automation
to be able to pull off the feats they do. There were major changes to
how OpenSUSE did packaging to begin with to be able to pull off what
they did, and I simply don't think anyone here is prepared to do even
a small bit of that yet.

And before someone brings up Factory 2.0 and Modularity (because
someone *will*), neither of those solve the problem. Instead they
create new ones by completely decoupling package life cycles from the
distribution lifecycle (meaning that now it's even harder to introduce
distribution-wide changes) and requiring us to shimmy in ways to
handle multiple versions for creating weird bundles without being
prepared to figure out how to actually keep that sane.