Well, the plan was to have 0.10 as the next release and up to now this is still priority numbero uno.
Since work on 0.10 is more advanced then work on 0.09.6 and the new core is a lot better, releasing a worse version would be under the developers niveau (and could also give a wrong picture of FPSEce since there will be no main support) and no, the older ones are no "betas" but final ports of the original FPSE versions. Thing is that FPSE advances with FPSEce and the other way around since LDChen works parallel on both.
But thanks to the newest updates, 0.09.6 is not buggier then 0.09.5 however, it lacks important features like a possiblity to disable 2700g support as the whole version is not planned as public release but as a way to test features seperated from the new core.
Well you can see my qualifications in my signature (Admin / Special Member and I was beta-tester before, so this gives a bit more trust) and I'm a hard working member for over one year now (in fact FPSEce was the first forum I every joined when I bought my first PDA cause I searched for a way to play C&C) with a lotta promo-work, posts and threads to help the community (I have two sticky threads, as many as the main developer :P and more then any member) as well as I worked hard to feature a great amount of PSX freeware for everyone. I don't want to praise myself here I just wanna show that it was hard work to become a tester and since only the two main developers decide about those special ranks, I would have had no chance if there wouldn't have been two high-rank members (thank you again at this place) who have suggested me since they in fact already have a huge amount of beta-testers.
So long blabla, I'm happy to be allowed to bring you those news (since I was the only one who asked and whom was granted to post those screenshots, so be happy that I made it, otherwise you wouldn't even know

).
So to give this post a bit more sense then just talking about myself, there are plans to have an own GPU Plugin especially for WindowsMobile 5.0 that uses the new DirectX Mobile. It can be slower but as I was told, looks way better and has far less graphical bugs then the Plugin currently in use. Just to keep you up to date.