Willy Tarreau [off-list ref] writes:

Rest assured that I don't feel comfortable on 1.7.9 either, that's a big
jump for me but I know that most often it works quite well :-)

It being a big jump is not a problem I can solve, as it is up to you
to deliberately stay behind until you decide to make a big jump.

I can indirectly solve it by not backporting as many fixes to the
maintenance tracks, but I am too nice to be playing that nasty ;-).