When you write software in isolation, for yourself and no others, you are not beholden to anyone's timescales but your own. Sadly for those of us who enjoy writing software this is a very rare state of being for a project. Usually there are other users, other developers, and other timescales to consider.

In the world of free software, some projects make a thing out of aggregating a lot of software together into something larger and coherent. We often refer to these things as 'Distributions' though there are other mechanisms by which software is aggregated.

When you have some software which goes into a software distribution of some kind, you're suddenly beholden to someone else's timing. For example if your software goes into a Debian release, you can be confident that the version of the program which goes into the release will be in active use for a number of years after the release; and you ought to provide support for that. Sadly it is exactly this which encourages people to not have their software packaged into distributions; which results in more pain for users.

If you love your users, I encourage you to pick at least one distribution and get your software into it. And then set yourself up to be the best upstream you possibly can, and provide support for the duration of that distribution's release. While it is hard, it is a surprisingly gratifying thing to do and will teach you lessons which no amount of Yakking articles could do.