There is difference between bug-fixing from developers point of view and release management from the program point of view. Once developers fixed a problem and verification has run successfully, packages are handed over to release management. People in the release management group have their own schedule for releases and currently those done in monolithic way due to various reasons, both technical and operational (for example, any incremental update would still need to be properly working in monolithic release due to production line requirements). In addition, Nokia-wide approaches are to be followed as nobody is turning working production processes to Maemo specifics overnight; rather Maemo needs to adopt.

Said that, I'd too would like to see repository updates working incrementally sooner than later. However, I know the difference between upgrading through repository and getting properly working monolithic build could be very hard to achieve sometimes. Unfortunately, space/memory limitations on the device side are not helpful in allowing apt/dpkg to solve all upgrades properly 100% of time and bugs are bugs, they are in apt/dpkg too. I know, I've been doing GNU/Linux distribution development with apt for more than 10 years...