It's not about version numbers. I wasn't a UE3 licensee, but I'd imagine that came with decent support and the release of features to keep pace with the industry at the time. Godot obviously can't be expected to provide Epic Games-level support, but the main development efforts from the OSS team was split since they were (understandably) focused on Godot 4. So all of the improvements/changes in 4 were completely useless to most users during that time, who were realistically only going to be able to use 3.5.

There was no hint of a release date, a roadmap, or anything like that. It felt like Godot 4 was going to be stuck in development hell forever, meanwhile people trying to actually build a game would be stuck on the increasingly obsolete and divergent 3.5 (unless you were willing/able to maintain an incomplete engine during development). So that was essentially 4 years of nothing to most people (tbf 3.5 did continue to get bug fixes during that time).

I say this not to trash on the Godot team's work, but rather to say that I think they should focus less on improving the engine for the sake of it, and more on work that seeks to increase the direct value it provides to users (which includes potential customers of W4 Games).