Hi Ryan,
As you've no doubt already found there's no easy way to differentiate a minor from major release on the version table. The solution I've found to this is reporting from the version table and aggregating distinct count only of the knowledge field.
This will boil down the total count to only major releases of an article - and each major release will be counted separately (i.e. if the article was published 3 times, it will count this as 3, not 1 for the whole thing or 6+ for all minor changes).
The next hurdle I find is the "Trend by", as the created date doesn't mean that's when the article went live at all. Modified on is unable to differentiate new articles from retired articles. If you're not using AQIs you could trend on kb_knowledge modified time. If you are using AQIs or anything else which can update a field in the metadata of an article without going through the publishing workflow then this solution won't work for you.
If that's the case, a custom field to record a "Published" timestamp may be the best option for trending.
