User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: May 10, 2011/@comment-166269-20110510184908/@comment--20110510193705

Beta is not a stable release, so no, we are not actively looking at it until .17 is officially released. And being in B1, it'll probably be a few more beta versions until it is ready.

But being a MediaWiki developer myself, I definitely understand your excitement. 1.17 has some great new features though the most of the ResourceLoader functionality is something Wikia has been doing for a long time.