That's fair. The 1.17.3 release supporting Python 3.5--3.8 went well enough. The only glitch was that I had to explicitly use OSX 10.6 and icode 6.4 for the 3.5 wheels on the Mac.

So do you have a preference for dropping or not dropping for 1.18?

Let's not drop it. Four weeks isn't that long to wait.