How do you not get this? 2.5 will not be a merge of 1.5 and 2.0. 1.5 and 2.0, no merge. Is any of this getting through to you? They don't develop features in 1.5 and 2.0 in parallel and at some point magically hope that it will fit back together. That is your ludicrous way of thinking about how things work. And yes, it is nothing less than ludicrous.

You are assuming that ED are building a car with square wheels, then proceed to tell everybody that ED are idiots because 'DAFUQ, square wheels!'. What you don't get is that they never planned to use square wheels.

You are once again off the reservation.

I don't need to have faith in ED or any of that nonsense. I still had access to their repos when they decided to release 2.0 before the Georgia terrain was ported to the new terrain format.

1.5 currently is just a stop gap, it's an old version that they have patched to keep up with the features of 2.0. Once Georgia is completely redone, they'll simply ditch the 1.5 branch and be done with it. 2.5 will be 2.0 with Georgia and what new features they can cram in 2.0 up to that point. The jump in version number is simply to denote all the work that has gone into that step.