I would certainly welcome turning our attention to bugfixing, but I think a new release is not too close at this time. Here's an overview of what remains to do.
Fred's text refactoring still contains a number of serious bugs and fixes. He promised to fix them but I don't know when this will happen. Most of these bugs are not in the tracker, as I reported them to him directly; I can put them into the tracker if anyone wants to have a look. Plus there's something seriously bad with text export into PS (#1015845) and with rendering of text with gradients (#1038594).
The UI that I'm doing for the new text features is barely started. I just added one command, put text to path. Several more commands are needed for this to become useful.
Mental's work on layers is, by his words, 25% ready. I'm not sure what is needed for it to become release-able, but I think at least the statusbar widget with visibility and locking toggles must become functional. Now it's pretty broken. Plus we need to create new document templates with layers and test them thoroughly.
Aubi's work on gtkmmfication of dialogs is unfinished and is left in a pretty borken state (e.g. Find dialog is in two copies). Someone needs to at least clean this up.
Ishmal's file dialogs are wonderful, but they still feel very rough with several bugs and usability bads (# 1018798). I would like to fix whatever possible before the release.
I don't know the status of Ted's work on plugins.
Myself, I haven't yet finished some feature work I'm working on. There are also several pet bugs I want to fix, some of which may turn out very difficult. And finally I cannot delay updating tutorials any more. It's a lot of writing with all the new features that need to be described.
Simarilius still cannot do a compile on Windows. Can anyone please help him? He wants to do developing and bugfixing but cannot.
Last but not least, Brisgeek hasn't yet done a new About box for 0.40.
So overall, it's all in a pretty disconcerted state. Let's focus our efforts on achieving releaseability, but I don't think we can enter a freeze in less than a couple of weeks.