I'm opening this issue to create a place to talk through how we are going to merge the many PRs that have built up over the past month (which is great!) in an order that makes sense (which might be hard).

As a starter, it would be good to tag PRs as something that can go in release 0.8.4 (patch level change => no existing code should stop running) versus 0.9.0 (minor version change => some code might need to be adjusted to work with the release).

I'll update this post later to try to include a list of the existing PRs, any dependencies, and which of these two releases they should go with.