Right now I've got both 5.8.6rc2 and 5.9Pseudo1 installed. (VL64-5.9Pseudo0.1 goes on the Gateway this weekend

) In a way it's a shame 5.8.6 was dropped because it pretty much was ready for prime time if you didn't include Beryl. The only bugs I've seen:
1. Grub -- didn't label partitions correctly and didn't choose correct partitions or kernel/initrd images for other Linux partitions. I had to boot into VL and manually edit my /boot/grub/menu.lst
2. X Configuration -- Installer set my resolution at 800x600 even though I specified 1024x768. Every 5.x release has done this and I get a small desktop surrounded by black on my Toshiba laptop. I had to manually edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fix this. Nothing new here.
3. pygobject, a dependency for wifi-radar, wasn't installed. wifi-radar won't start without it. A slapt-get pygobject fixed this.
That's it and it's a pretty small list. I didn't install Beryl since I knew it was a problem child.
Why bother? PERFORMANCE! With the newer kernel and whatever tweaks were done KDE simply flies even on my nearly five year old Toshiba laptop (1 GHz Celeron, 512MB RAM). 5.8.6rc2 is faster than 5.8 SOHO. That, plus pretty much all the patches/upgrades to 5.8 SOHO are already installed. rc2 has some newer versions of apps and tools than rc1 as well.
Anyway, that's my take on 5.8.6rc2. I'll use 5.9 for testing and, obviously, to build packages. My working installation, though, will be 5.8.6rc2 until 6.0 is ready for prime time.