Well, I installed Feisty. I know I said I was going to wait, but the fact that I tried anyway and it wouldn’t let me – well that was tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet. I sidestepped the error it was giving me about required disk space – to discover that it wasn’t kidding. Because of some ill-advised, and frankly lame, disk space usage during install, it ended up being unable to create a vital system file (the initrd image) on /boot and consequently failed to properly configure several packages, and was not at all happy when I rebooted – i.e. it didn’t boot at all.
But whatever. I wasn’t worried, or I wouldn’t have tried to disengage the safety mechanisms in the first place. Nobody else but me is in charge of this PC! Anyway, a short live CD fixup later, everything is fine again. And I’m not really using much more space on /boot than before. Not really much to report that is noticeably different, but I’m able to take advantage of the latest and greatest again.