I agree, Oracle aren't terrible stewards of MySQL, but that's not my point. Yes 5.5 and 5.6 are good releases. MariaDB 10 is an even better release and shows that Monty has still got value beyond what any large corporation can provide.

I know for a fact that if we were forced away from MariaDB back to stock Oracle MySQL releases, we'd have to expand onto more slaves and fix queries that are no longer optimized.