I'm happy to report that things seem to be calming down nicely, and rc5 is noticeably smaller than previous rc's. Let's hope the trend continues.
About a third of the changes are to drivers (networking, rdma, scsi, block, misc), with the rest being spread out all over (tooling, networking, filesystems, arch updates, core kernel..)
Nothing looks particularly worrisome, so assuming the trend holds, we look to be on track for a fairly normal release cycle despite the early hiccups due to the holidays.
Go out there and test in between the commercial breaks,