I prefer Masem's approach, if only because it's simpler (just one package to worry about). The only issues I can see with it are:

• Reduced visibility of the beta code (which isn't necessarily an issue: you don't really want people finding beta code before a stable version that already does what they want, and when they grab the stable version, oh hey, here's a beta module to try out)
• increased footprint (extra code means extra files that the user doesn't have much of a choice about downloading, which might be annoying for student users with fascist disk quotas to worry about).