Latest in portage is 1.6.1 which was released 4 months ago. 1.7.1 was released two months ago.
I agree it'd be good to bump it. We likely want to stick with LTS versions for a while but that was the 1.4.x series. The 1.6.x series is considered EOL.
Created attachment 338674 [details] 1.7.3 ebuild
Created attachment 338676 [details] Fixed dependency in ovs-controller lo -> net
1.9.0 is now in the tree