Yes but there has been quite a number of 'last minute important fixes' traffic, not least a few fixes I consider important. I can't find anything that lets me know if those fixes are queued up anywhere - not even with the magical 'look at internal server' patch. Without the sqfixes page and its brethren I'm stuck. Terribly vexing.
The use of the internal update stream seems to be a real weakness in the current release cycle. In the good ol' days (you know, when men were REAL men and women were REAL women and little furballs from aldebaran were REAL little furballs from aldebaran) SqC was testing everything that went into the internal stream almost immediately (which meant that we usually updated at least once a day if not more often). So the internal update stream allowed us to review everything that's "hot off the press" and in quite a number of situations we found (some really horrible) problems before they went out to the general public and at times fixed them "under the hoods" (such as by rewriting files directly on the server, heh, heh ;-)
However, if nobody who is both willing to test hot stuff as well as having the authority to fix any problems right away is sitting on top of the internal updates it seems utterly pointless to even have it. So if you have to 'look at the internal server' or any such thing then it means that the current release cycle is severely broken. The internal updates were always intended to be tested immediately and not to rot until they're forgotten.
I don't know how many people (if any) use the internal update stream (I no longer do because I no longer have authority to post any updates) but if there aren't a few experienced people who use it daily then I would recommend getting rid of it altogether. After all, it's up to people to decide when they wish to update and there is always some risk that updates (in particular on alpha/beta streams) could break something. But on the other hand, given the lengthy discussion each update seems to receive before it ever gets promoted, the chances for breaking anything in truly horrible ways seem to be pretty small.
So my bottom line recommendation is: Get rid of this darn "internal" update stream if you don't use it! Rather I would suggest to require submissions to identify changes that interact with the system in critical ways (such as any rewrite of deep system level stuff). Then require a minimum number of EXPERIENCED testers (and not just eyeballs which all claim that "yes it files into a virgin image just fine") to look at and try this stuff in real life situations to identify possible problems. And leave it up to the people submitting the change to identify those testers - after all there's either a demand for the change so it ought to be simple to find them or else that person has an interest in this change so he or she ought to be able to convince a few people to test it.
Cheers, - Andreas