That said, I do think our stabilization process could be improved! I believe, as I said earlier, that it has never been better, but that doesn’t mean it’s good enough. As other parts of our process have improved, they have revealed the long dormant inadequacy of this part of our process.
In fact, there have been process improvements floating around within various people's minds; one thing that we're hoping to start trying out for point releases and possibly relatively major feature stabilizations is asking the community to help us test them. We're also unofficially going to try and bake patches to stable/beta on nightly for at least 7 days before releasing the stable backports; you can see an example of this here: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/patch-testing-for-1-27-2.
We certainly have more capacity and ability to do point releases now than before. That capacity change has not really been met with many process improvements; unfortunately, we are unaware of people with time and interest in proposing and working through a more formal process currently. I think the post-edition state of Rust is likely to have sufficient bandwidth for this, though.