My personal feeling is that we should have any patch, compatible or not, whenever they are ready whilst we are in Alpha stage. I think it's quite clear than alpha means non-finished, and implies the improvments will be forthcoming.
However, from the devs point of view, they are trying to make LFS a real product, and as such don't want to continually release patches which beginners to LFS might find disorientatiing (i.e. suddenly finding that there is no one online, or no servers exist, and not knowing why). So, I can see why they want to save up fixes and improvements to one big update.
It's a difficult situation. The big LFS fans want it to progress, the beginners want it to progress, but might not be active enough to realise an update has been released or how to install it, and the devs don't want to distrupt the game. At the end of the day it's the devs project, so their wishes I guess come first.