I think on a side note, a development snapshot should be released more often, for several reasons:
1. As you say, people would stop submitting outdated bugs, but rather they'd be forced to use the "latest snapshot"
2. For lazy people (like me) who dont know cvs at all (I played with it sometime, but Im too lazy to be updating my local copy too often)
3. And some other
BTW, Do you meant a binary snapshot? Im talking more like a source one, but a binary would be fine for the testers
And this is just MHO, but a RC1 would imply the 1.0 is almost ready and only bug fixing should be done, so probably the focus should be to fix the current bugs and implement the TODOs and some "cool" requested features, then make the RC1