I voted yesterday for release branch also (in the topic: Plugin binary size (4.2 = bloat)
We can live without release branch but please at least when you do (ad point 7) new master commit tagged as new version, mark it first as RC (Release Canditate) - 4.4RC in this example.
This way you send signal to us that you think that this particular develop commit is stable enough to be new version.
And then we can do more checking on RC and give you feedback if we also agree that it’s stable. Because not all of us will be able to follow the develop branch all the time and check it constantly.
You can simply remove the “RC” from version tag after some time of silence where no bug is found. And we can avoid the problems of using the not-so-stable release in our products.
Cheers,