This release was actually made available on Aug. 11 by Michael Smith, but I was working down at Cape Canaveral, and didn't get a chance to post on it.
The 1.69.1 release is production-quality, and fixes a minor bug-fix to the 1.69.0 test release, after a performance issue was identified with annotation support in xsltproc. The annotation.support parameter is now off by default.
I've been testing the 1.69.0 release on Saxon 6.5.4, and did not notice any performance issues.
The latest stylesheets are available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/
Thanks Michael!
See also: DocBook
