I don't necessarily think staying in one place for too long is good. Things stagnate after a while. Major vanilla changes always result in an influx of new mods, new people, and new ideas. We're at one of those points again where many mods are likely just going to die off, and it's always a bit exciting to see what comes out of that. I'm not particularly attached to 1.7.10 anyway. There's some nice things about it, but I still prefer 1.6.4.
Despite enjoying the changes as they come, I still play really old versions, even mod them on occasion. In fact, part of why I started making FMC was just to make it easier for me to pull some of these old versions apart. I used some of the early tools to remap and decompile a particular version of Classic a while back, even. Down the road I want to release mappings/patches/etc for old versions, too. Best case scenario is that I'll have time to implement some form of API that's similar for all the ones I want to support. But for the time being, 1.8.1 is what's relevant, so that's what I'm focused on while I actually get everything working.