I would like to add one more point to this "thought" of milestones and
releases, that is very important for release tracking and that plagues
me every day.

I think, that the issues and issue status are not necessarily a 1 to 1
relationship. For example you can have an issue in the software that
will affect one release branch and the current trunk. You need to close
the issue in both pathes, in order to be sure that you have solved the
problem forever. Currently I copy tickets and cross reference them, but
this is extra overhead. Additionally the tree nature of source control
systems could automatically help in tracking defects through the
branches if one could assign the defect to a specific revision.So the
ticket stays open in one branch until someone comes by and closes it,
while it is already closed and released in a maintenance release for
another branch.

One of the current problems is exactly that there is no idea of version
numbers and their logical order. The second problem is, that the issues
and issue status fields are tight together.

If I only could provide some code or even had some time to help out in
this field, ...

Best regards
Dirk