??? Putting it into master would just mean that it is part of the nightly builds, and nightly builds generally aren’t something you’d want to use in production either.
Besides, the 2.8 branch will be moved into master very soon, so there honestly was no point in doing so. If you absolutely must use it in nightly builds now, you can just apply one of the earlier versions of the patch.
Currently, we are in a very long stretch without stable releases. That was known for years in advance and it’s extremely important for Blender’s development in the long term. Complaining that you’ll have to use a very unreliable branch instead of a somewhat unreliable branch because you don’t want to wait a few months or build your own version is, well, “professionally amateurish” I guess.
And regarding technical writing (I’m replying to this since I wrote the comment you refer to): Look, I’m doing this for fun in my free time. I’m also doing Cycles coding as a job, and if the IES patch was part of that, I’d write documentation if needed. However, it’s not, it’s something I’m doing for fun in my free time on top of a coding job and university. This results in two things. First of all, I have to allocate my time. Sure, I could spend three hours on detailed documentation, but I could also spend them on another feature. And on the other hand - writing code is fun, writing docs isn’t. Again, if this was a job, this wouldn’t matter, but if I’m giving up a rather large part of my free time for this, it absolutely does matter.