In the OSP 16 to 17 upgrade there will be no interim containers to facilitate the database migrations like we did for 13 to 16. The database migrations for OSP 17.x must be able to migrate directly from OSP 16.x.
Nova has not removed any DB migrations... ever. We also have an upstream functional test that makes sure that the DB migrations apply correctly starting from a bare database. Also also, we have specifically not introduced any DB schema changes between stable/train and stable/wallaby. Because of that, we're pretty confident that this RFE's request will happen "for free". If we want to be really paranoid, can DFG:Upgrades re-raise this for the 17 -> 18 FFU? DFG:Compute doesn't expect any changes or added risk in that time frame, but it'd be good to keep awareness and visibility.