why bugs only fixed in trunk?

[Leo]

One of the incentives to report bugs in the pretest is to have them
squashed before the release. Unfortunately it seems most bugs are just
fixed in trunk (which could mean wait another year for the fix) even if
reported against a pretest build.

Is there an implicitly agreed practice here?

Anyway, I think I am discouraged to report bugs and inclined to just
code a workaround in my .emacs.

Long ago I used to report bugs in the org mode that was bundled with
emacs but then the project's practice was to only fix in the development
trunk. So I save myself some time stop reporting bugs there.

Leo