Ah, I understand. We do have users who prefer the stage model or hybrid DAG mixed with stages, but I get that that isn't your point of view. I do hope that after the next couple releases it becomes something more useful for you - your use case is important too.
Releasing early to get feedback on issues is important to us but we can do better communicating around what's an early preview vs. a mature feature. The maturity page that's linked to in this discussion is actually part of how we are trying to improve our communication around that. This is more at the stage and category level, but features have a maturity level as well and it's worth us reflecting on how that can be made more clear.
Sorry if I am a bit frank, but I simply do not believe you when you say you have users who prefer the "hybrid DAG mixed with stages". That's a bit like Microsoft saying that there are users who enjoy the 255 character path limit. My use case isn't an "improved DAG model", it is a DAG model without the pointless restrictions introduced by broken legacy.
In the DAG model (which really is just the model implemented by every sane build tool ever made), stages give you no extra expressive power, they only add arbitrary restrictions to that model and aren't useful at all.
Releasing early to get feedback on issues is important to us but we can do better communicating around what's an early preview vs. a mature feature. The maturity page that's linked to in this discussion is actually part of how we are trying to improve our communication around that. This is more at the stage and category level, but features have a maturity level as well and it's worth us reflecting on how that can be made more clear.