If I am not mistaken, I think there was an emergency release because someone was flooding the blockchain with micro-transactions as an attack on dogecoin and they had to raise the transaction fee/minimum transfer.
Either with that or around that time they also had to do a patch to raise the transaction limit.
Both issues were hard to anticipate and I guess if you have to cause a fork, at least it happens while the chain was "young".
There was nothing hard to anticipate about the dogecoin fork; literally hours after the commit making it possible was made I heard from Litecoin/Bitcoin developer Warren Togami among others that the Dogecoin devs were idiots who had just set themselves up for a fork. Similarly the micro-transactions flood was something people had predicted would happen well in advance.
To outsiders this stuff may seem mysterious and hard, but to people with real experience in this field it's easy to see that the Dogecoin team don't have a clue.
I patched dogecoin to fix the transaction limit to prevent dust.
What I am realizing is that dogecoin, by virtue of being not so serious, is gaining more developer mindshare who want to experiment and learn. That's what makes it fun, and what gives it potential.
What makes you think those arguments are coming from the good Bitcoin devs/theorists? That community - I'm a part of it - thinks altcoins are valuable testing grounds for ideas and have used Litecoin for testing out new ideas in the past.
But Litecoin has the very competent Warren Togami as lead dev right now; if dogecoin had competent devs maintaining the client they'd get some respect. But they don't.
Before Charles Lee started Litecoin he created Fairbrix, a re-branded and tweaked version of Tenebrix. If you know anything about what happened to Fairbrix it is clear he was learning on the job (not a "competent dev" by your standards). Looking down your nose at Dogecoin's devs because they are still learning the codebase is pretty hypocriticial.
That's why I specifically said Warren Togami - he's taken over from Charles Lee as the main driver of Litecoin development and has done an excellent job at that.
Believe me, I know. I've written a few times now to the non-dogecoin communities that attacking dogecoin would just make it stronger; even a successful attack won't do anything because doge doesn't actually need to work to grow their community.
It's much more useful to us to watch Dogecoin fork and get more valuable data on how forking events happen to crypto-coins.
It's a pity that Dogecoin uses such an out of date codebase - having it more up-to-date would give a nice target with real economic value and importantly transaction volume for testing out exploits. (for crypto-coins "exploits" can mean economic design issues which can't necessarily be fixed with code changes) The very short block interval makes attacks like selfish mining easier to try out for instance. Similarly because they kept the 1MB blocksize limit, but with a 10x shorter 1m interval, it gives insight into what Bitcoin would look like if the blocksize limit was raised.
Keep in mind that most people in the crypto-coin dev/theory community don't actually own that many coins, and in any case are insiders that can easily move their coins to whatever crypto-currency is most likely to grow. The smart people aren't wedded to any particular currency, but rather the growth of crypto-currencies in general. Understanding how they fail is essential to making crypto-currencies succeed in the long run.
Either with that or around that time they also had to do a patch to raise the transaction limit.
Both issues were hard to anticipate and I guess if you have to cause a fork, at least it happens while the chain was "young".