The 44 release is delayed, and in testing right now, while the team swaps the controller daemon and adds the new OGC kernel if I'm not mistaken. There's some first-hand information here, but you're right that the delay could have been better announced.

I'm having a similar issue. Every time I try to update, it says there are no new updates even though I see additional updates listed. I'm not sure if it's the result of a delay in release or if my tag got expired and I need to do a rebase to fix the issue.