We debated this at length during the Thirdparty Library/Target Platforms SIG:
http://ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Planning/Thirdparty
We supported Maverick for Electric and it was a big waste of time because:
- Most people using non-LTS releases upgrade to the next non-LTS release
- It wasted a lot of developer time providing compatibility fixes
- non-LTS releases by Ubuntu generally have significant bugs that hurt integration
- it requires many more servers for us to build another distribution
Applying the same logic to Fuerte, plus with Precise (new LTS) around the corner, it would be a huge developer effort with little benefit.
You can still build Fuerte from source on Natty; you just don't get binary builds nor Natty-specific patches.
Steven Bellens describes it below. Still hate to think that there's no easy upgrade path for the natty etc folks..