I think there are good grounds to prepare a 1.4.4 release, with the intention of making this the last release of the stable branch. MD has recently called "all hands" to focus on 1.5, so there is where we are going.
Having an official 1.4.4 will also give packagers a known-good version of the 1.4 branch to package. There are a few bugs in 1.4.3 that don't make me too happy :p
Petr is going through some issues, and I'll run over reported bugs to see if there's anything large to deal with. If nobody speaks up against it, I'll be looking into calling a freeze on Monday 14th, planning to tag & release Tuesday or so.
Cheers!