In retrospect what we should have done is released version 1.0 about 7 years ago when the parser was more or less fully compliant with the spec at the time and just been prepared to bump the version for backwards-incompatible changes (note that at the time the conventions of semver were not as widely adopted as they are now).
What actually happened was we planned a 1.0 release, and so made a series of "final" pre-1.0 version numbers like 0.90, 0.99,etc. and then kept finding one more thing to do, coupled with a decreasing amount of time working on it, and finally spec changes that we didn't keep up with. There certainly wasn't any TeX-like intent to converge on a number, just a series of decisions that seemed reasonable at the time, but had an overall effect that was ridiculous.
In retrospect what we should have done is released version 1.0 about 7 years ago when the parser was more or less fully compliant with the spec at the time and just been prepared to bump the version for backwards-incompatible changes (note that at the time the conventions of semver were not as widely adopted as they are now).
What actually happened was we planned a 1.0 release, and so made a series of "final" pre-1.0 version numbers like 0.90, 0.99,etc. and then kept finding one more thing to do, coupled with a decreasing amount of time working on it, and finally spec changes that we didn't keep up with. There certainly wasn't any TeX-like intent to converge on a number, just a series of decisions that seemed reasonable at the time, but had an overall effect that was ridiculous.