Nightly builds are for us budding teenage kids who play in the dark, totally aware of our own inadequaties and flaws - it's like holding your first love in the hand and dreaming of an adulthood so far away... we hold our breath while exploring what is actually possible to do... with the beautiful girl and the equally beautiful pictures and footage our cam is capable of, and we dream far beyond what is physically possible... HDR, Raw... her smile, her hair, backlit, do I open the flash... Ahh no, open the diaphragm a bit...
ML is what dreams are made of, not some consumer level kind of spaghetti bolognese...
ML expands what you can do with your camera. You really start exploiting ML when you have fully exploited the in-camera options. When you know your cam by heart.
People who buy a camera and install ML right away are in for a very tough lesson. For every available option the cam has, you can multiply with a factor 2 or 3 as soon as you open the ML menu. You are kids, and you're living your childhood with the best toy ever invented: the camera. Walk through the basics. Try a new lens or two. Experiment with portraying the sweetest girl in the world - the one from paragraf 1. A consumer cam has an option for HDR, but if you teach yourself AEB or even manual AE, the result is so much more rewarding. Her eyes, so dark and mysterious in a cascade of off-focus hair... That's what photo is about.
Learn the basics with the camera that has most appeal to you. If it's a Canon, count yourself lucky that in this world we have people like... Ahh no names, but you'all know who I mean. If you are a beginner in photo, learn your camera. If you know your camera inside-out, come and enjoy the tremendous work other outstandingly good photographers - and programmers - have done: ML.
And if you're a beginner, photo is like meeting the worlds most beautiful girl, catching her eye and exchange phone numbers... you hold your breath, for the world is spinning around you, and the NOW is bigger than life... With ML you're practically holding her hands and looking in her eyes and seeing a universe of a future..
Let us never forget why we became photographers in the first place.
What I wanted to say to irvcobb: If the ML/600d hasn't changed from April 9, maybe it's because it works. That's a testimony to the quality those dev deliver: No complaints in 5 months.