janoc, Bassman59,
First of all, apologies, I should have clarified that the last "stable" release on the KiCAD download website is an older version.
CERN seems to be contributing most of the newer features such as push and shove I believe?
CERN is contributing P&S but most of the mainline development is done by the folks who've been doing it for a long time. As I noted, the developer mailing list is quite active.
From the perspective of going into a website (such as DT, Eagle) and downloading the "latest" binary, KiCAD is not actively compiled, maybe that would be a better term or phrase. There may be very good reason for it not to be, but I remember back along when I saw some videos of KiCAD with some newer features and I couldn't for the life of me find the "download" for it, I thought it was someone's own personal version they had modified for themselves, until i found a link to a CERN branch and compiled that.
I must admit I haven't downloaded from the BZR for a while, so things might have changed / merged or whatever, but from a pure downloader's perspective it is not actively *compiled*.
Your complaint is a common one. A lot of people write to the kicad-users list asking for the latest "stable" version, and they have to be told, "the developers aren't interested in declaring anything 'stable'," and the users -- especially Windows users -- quite rightly say that building is difficult, how do I know I've got the right stuff, etc etc. Now there are various folks who've set up nightly builds which get published, or at least they've posted occasional snapshots. Some are linked to from the main Kicad website (which is out of date, of course).
I'm of the opinion that users shouldn't have to build the program from source, but the developers clearly disagree. I remember a couple of years ago, trying to build kicad, and went down the rabbit hole of dependencies of dependences, and reporting build bugs to the developer launchpad site, and being told, "we don't have Macs, why don't YOU fix it and contribute, or send us a Mac and if we have time we'll think about supporting the platform." Luckily (for me, I suppose), at least one developer is strong with OS X development and took over ensuring that the tools all built on Macs. Yes, there are a lot of Mac users who want to see tools that run on the platform.
Anyways, one of the biggest complaints the developers were getting was about chasing down the dependencies, so they really made the effort to simplify that, to the point where the main makefile will download and build the dependencies for you. And, as I said, at least on OS X 10.9.5 with the latest Xcode 6, the tools build all the time.