People new to Drupal come to drupal.org and click on Get Started with Drupal. In
step one they can read:
Installation Profiles
Drupal Installation profiles are pre-packaged website solutions for specific use cases.
They include Drupal core as well as additional modules.
More Drupal 7 installation profiles will become available in the near future.
If that is the route they are interested in they will soon feel that Drupal is a broken mess when they
can't find an Installation Profile with a release in the last 3 months.
It's not for the lack of contributors trying either. They have projects available on d.o. but it's
not possible to do a release because of an issue that causes your .make file to be rejected. I'm
not sure if this (http://drupal.org/node/751242) issue is the hold up as there seem to be others
related.
All I know is that it's getting frustrating for contributors, and must be even worse for someone
new to Drupal and thinking an Installation Profile is the way to go. If we can't fix the problem maybe we
should edit Get Started with Drupal so they won't get a bad impression.