Re: access to ELPA development packages?

[dick]

You've explained this poorly, and at too esoteric a level of detail.

Donning my anti-flak jacket in preparation for RMS's justifiable indignation
at my having spoken for his eminence, RMS is more concerned about the public's
conflation of MELPA with GNU, the former having accrued enough name
recognition over the years to become metonymous with the emacs community despite
flouting FSF doctrine.

The MELPA versioning deficiencies are irksome yes, but in no way deleterious
to MELPA's popularity or basic function, which is two-fold, to provide a
package archive unconstrained by FSF doctrine, and to feed our narcissism as
programmers.  To expand on the latter, more than ninety percent of the
packages hosted on MELPA are pet projects of dubious practical value.

To those ends, MELPA provides real value, the objections of ideologues 
notwithstanding.