> My understanding is that Unix V8-V10 were not full distributions but  patches. 

"Patch" connotes  individually distributed small fixes, not complete working systems. I don't believe Brendan meant that v8 was only a patch on v7, but that's the natural interpretation of the statement. 

V8-v10 were snapshots, yes,  possibly not perfectly in sync with the printed editions. But this was typical of Research editions, and especially of Volujme 2,

which was originally called something like "Documents for Use with Unix".

Doug