GM fellow Polkadot community, we would like to add the following mention regarding the release of Substrate, Polkadot and Cumulus crates to crates.io.
As already mentioned in the forum thread for this topic Substrate, Polkadot and Cumulus crates are now being released to crates.io under the parity-crate-owner user. This crates will be released together with the Parity Polkadot node, being the target release cadence every two weeks.
For instance, you can see that the runtimes maintained by the Polkadot Technical Fellowship are already pointing their dependencies to the releases on crates.io as for PR#28.
We hope this information is useful for you and your team on choosing your preferred way to manage dependencies and releases.