Noticed that current mercurial dev version of chirp has version header on console of "0.3.0dev" Should this be bumped to 0.4.0dev ?

Yeah, technically, although now that everyone uses daily builds instead of grabbing the source, it doesn't matter all that much what's really in the tree.

Along these lines, any plans for a stable branch and release of 0.4.0 ?

I dunno, I haven't given it much thought or looked at the feature delta since 0.3.x to see if it's justified. What do other people think?