As a software developer, my suggestion would be to make the CIV code so modular that different modules could be patched quickly and independently. This mother-of-all-patches approach that Take-Two is adopting will likely leave us wanting when more bugs are discovered in it.

I remember for Civ3 there were beta patches released ahead of time so that the masses put them through their paces. They were probably more thoroughly tested and there was something to look forward to every few weeks.

One problem with beta patches here would be a need for separate instances of GameSpy Lobby for each active version.