I don't think this one has been fixed yet: Flow_offloading=1 is broken on latest snapshot (4.19 issue)
Since 19.07 includes flow offloading for the first time for a number of popular devices (ath79) I think it's critical to have that fixed before releasing it.
As far as I understand default kernel version for 19.07 build version for your device is 4.14 and not 4.19
It is broken only on master, not on 19.07.
Packages that are updated at source being only committed to Master but rarely to the stale 19.x branch. By the time 19.x gets released those packages will be outdated already and who knows when the next branch after 19.x gets forked off Master - at the current pace probably not for another year.
Unless I am miss-comprehending various forum posts I am under the impression that packages should not be updated by the user individually/independently of release updates (sysupgrade)?
You lost me there - I would understand that would apply to packages fed from other repos (feed) than the main OpenWrt. And anything provided by the OpenWrt repo (feeds) needs to be uplifted/backported to the specific branch repo after being tested in Master repo, which does not seem to happen automatically.
There are a number of packages in Master that are on par with source but not making it into the branch. And with the current release pace who knows when Master being forked again?
Thorought the lifetime of a release, binary packages of the latest available version in the branch are automatically built and made available in the repositories. There is no release required to get the latest version of some optional package, it just needs to be backported to the branch by its respective maintainer [within certain limits].
Correct, it does not happen automatically and needs to be done by the maintainers of the respective packages. The release branch is forked once initially and used as baseline for the builds. If nobody cares about it or backports stuff into it, it will get stale.
And there starts one of the problems, that maintainers are often not interested to backport to the current branch and rather prefer waiting till Master gets forked, which can be quite some time.
But that is perhaps digressing from the thread topic.
Exactly, but in my view a release is not a simple unmaintained archived master snapshot just for the sake of getting updated packages. If this is the sole requirement for a release, one could as well use snapshots.
Maybe maintenancers and developers can share their plans on release dates? I believe they read this forum.
19.10 is coming, just saying...
What?????? 19.10 release date
What month is it
november??
Next month (October).
Any idea if any new APs namely 802.11ax ones will be supported in this release?
wouldn't it be wonderful for one of the chip set company's to just make there AX drivers open source and for a current kernel oh what a dream it would be 
Intel's AX200 wlan card (no, that card does not support AP mode) is supported in mainline's iwlwifi driver since kernel v5.1. QCA's ath11k driver for their QCN5024/ QCN5054 and QCN5124/ QCN5154 cards (ipq807x) is currently being under review for kernel v5.5 (or maybe v5.6); the git repository where it's being developed has been public for at least half a year now.
While wireless driver availability is a precondition for corresponding router support, that does not mean immediate support for the 802.11ax routers shipping with them. Those will need more efforts beyond the basic wireless drivers (ipq807x is probably closest, but I would expect somewhere between 6 and 12 months before the first of those routers become supported by OpenWrt).
What is guaranteed though, is that 19.07.x will not support any 802.11ax devices yet.
Thanks for the update.