DMD needs branches

[Denton Cockburn]

With so many people calling for branches of D, is it not possible for some
to do it themselves? What prevents branching GDC at a supported level of
DMD support, then using that branch mainly as a bug-fixing branch?  I
thought GDC was an implementation of the D spec. 

Are there libraries that GDC uses that can't be accessed? and even if
that's so, it's more the language compiler and such that's the problem
right?  I'm new to D, just learning it now because it seems to be a very
nice mix between C/C++/Java and the dynamic languages such as
LISP/Python/Ruby/etc. I admit that the lack of stability, as much as seen
as a feature to some, causes a lot of trouble for someone just learning.
If there was a stable version to learn, then simply progress to learning
the new features of the next version, that'd make it a bit easier. 

There are enough examples out there where this works, Python (2.4, 2.5,
2.6, etc. each well documented) and Java (1.5, 1.6, etc). Just my 2 cents.