>> My pulled from the air guess is the set of users that need these incremental dissector\protocol changes is much smaller than the entire set of users, and their needs are served by the development branch.
Yes, the set of users is much smaller than the entire set of users, but not insignificant. However, the primary path they follow for support of the F5ethtrailer dissector is F5, not Wireshark.org.
And development branch? By this are you meaning to pull from source and build? This definitely seems to be a smaller sub-set of users. The website doesn't make it appear that there is even a development branch to be had. The downloads
area states:
The current stable release of Wireshark is 3.0.2. It supersedes all previous releases. You can also download the latest development release (3.0.0rc2) [which was built 22 Feb, 2019 if you go searching for it] and documentation.
If there was actually a development release to be had that was accessible to the non-compiling public it may be less of a pain point.