Hi,
Interesting discussion. :-) Here is my short take on this fwiw.
Two key points (public source: http://www.linaro.org/about)
1) Linaro's goals are to deliver value to its members through enabling their engineering teams to focus on differentiation and product delivery, and to reduce time to market for OEM/ODMs delivering open source based products using ARM technology.
2) Linaro is not a Linux distribution. The organization provides great software and tools for distributions to pull from.
So from the big picture, our first order optimization should be around these.
We've talked about how and when we release quite a lot over the last two years. My own belief (and I don't manage the release process) is that the second order of optimization should be for efficiency at the Working Group level (efficient engineers are happier engineers and that means more productivity) and that then, as a third priority, we see what we can do to help out folks who look at Linaro as a Linux and Android distribution.
I'm personally fond of this last one because we all know that Linaro's code rocks and many people want to pick it up and use it. A quick way to get there is for our members to ask us to develop an LTS (Long Term Support) version. We've talked about that previously as well and there are some member-affecting trade-offs to be made if we did that (which is why we haven't as of yet).
J