On not rushing things at the last minute

I'm disappointed by the last minute kitchen-sink dump of RFCs being raised, rushed through discussion, and voted on with minimal periods. While I'm all for delivering useful features to end users, I don't want us to get in the habit of seeing months of quiet followed by weeks of chaos every year around this time. This isn't even new, though it seems like it's becoming more commonplace with the adoption of the yearly cadence. What are the causes? Is it seasonal? Some people have more time during the summer because of school/family schedules? Maybe the solution is to shift the release window a few months in one direction or the other. Is it failing to get our shit together? Maybe we should discourage late RFCs by requiring a higher voting threshold? e.g. You can open voting as ridiculously late as a week before feature freeze (honestly, who would do that?) if you want, but you'll need an extra 10% to pass on top of whichever threshold already applies. We don't need to solve this now, this week, because there are plenty of rushed, last-minute proposals on the table already. But I'd like folks to start thinking about this and ways we can mitigate this problem come future releases. -Sara