Agreed - from what I can see this is an enabler for adding new features later (e.g. 4.1 or whatever). There seem to be a few nice things though - e.g. temporal anti aliasing and this fog etc. Some features/fixes from 4 are being backported to 3.x, but I am not sure if there is any stringent rationale for what gets backported and what doesn't.

Looking forward to the v4 release! Good luck to all involved.