i agree, snapshots are a very valuable technique to get people to try out the new stuff and see if they can break something. but if they are not able to try it out because of a major bug, all the new features remain basically untested until this one is fixed. this means the overall times that new features are "out in the wild" before releasing a major version decreases the longer this bug persists.
@CJ Burkey what debug commands are you talking about? i also recognized an improvement in 18w50a, but after half an hour of playing or so average tick rate went up to 60 seconds again. maybe some kind of cleanup problem? cpu iterates through more blocks than it has to after a while?