Nice New Studio Beta; but Where're the Service Packs for the Last Two Versions?

It's nice that MS have finally put the RAD back into Visual Studio; I haven't gotten hold of the bits yet, but I'm keenly looking forward to the nice, fast, stable, slick IDE I've been waiting for since vs.net came out back in 2000. Don't get me wrong, vs.net is OK; but let's face it, we use it by default - there's no real competition if you're developing on the MS platform. I've put up with countless crashes, weird and irritating bugs, and slow, sluggish behaviour for nearly four years. What I can't understand is why MS haven't released any service packs for vs.net - even though it desperately needs one (or several). I got used to the old pre-.net Visual Studio, where a service pack would be released periodically, even though MS were continuing development on the next release. Would it be difficult to branch the source and have a small team fixing bugs and providing a service pack now and then? I note that one is due shortly, but this is specifically to fix issues created by Win XP sp2.

But then, perhaps MS did release a patch to vs.net, but we didn't notice: the first vs.net release was visual studio version 7; vs.net 2003 ("Everett") has an internal version number of 7.1. Let's face it, the 2003 release didn't have much that was new in it, it wasn't really that much faster, but it did have some bug fixes.

Please, Microsoft, consider us poor users who adopted your .net vision, started using your IDE as soon as it was released, and are now bound to support apps created with the original vs.net versions for the foreseeable future - we can't all upgrade immediately...