@dbolkensteyn That’s a valid comment. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I’ll wait for “more-core” maintainers to chime in, but as @gavanderhoorn commented on answers, main reason why MoveIt! hasn’t been released into Kinetic is the dependency. MoveIt! is a huge set of software, so is the number of the depended packages.
Also we’re making fundamental changes that will require far less maintenance effort, one of which as discussed above is to consolidate the distributed repositories into fewer repo. Since ROS Kinetic is “LTS”, meaning once it’s released we won’t be able to make a substantial change for 5 years, we’re rather taking time now to make as much work done as possible. In fact some maintainers (notably @davetcoleman @v4hn @rhaschke) have been really working hard these few weeks for making it happen for Kinetic.