Today the GNOME release schedule proposal for 2.31/3.0 was published. Please keep discussion streamlined on desktop-devel mailing list.
It also lists high risk areas and potential showstoppers (please note the word “potential”) as I want to communicate them clearly to users, distributions and the community. Currently I personally don’t expect everything to work out as planned, as manpower is missing in crucial areas. Distributions and the community can help minimizing such potential regressions by providing more developer manpower, or at least help in testing. Please contribute if you can.
Another issue are of course those modules that are defacto unmaintained. Peer reviews could be arranged in such cases.