Not sure when you last looked at it, but we added the ability to cleanly shutdown and restart the cluster two releases ago. We are committed to providing a smooth upgrade path as well; that is not to say we will always be binary-compatible, as the next release involving the disk layer will change the on-disk representation, but we will always provide automatic upgrade scripts. So, if you last tested 0.29b or so, do check out the latest code in the repo.