> Picking the patches itself is a small part of the task
> But the result does have to be tested again to shake out the bugs that result from the patches being taken out of context.

And that's why I think this is too much maintenance work. As you point out, the maintainer who does the patch-picking can not guarantee that the stable branch now works as much as you cannot guarantee that f.e. the physical patches will work flawlessly. But still it will be expected somehow that he takes responsibility for that. So the story is not over, here: What has to be done after one round of cherry picking is again some extensive testing by several people who would, well, otherwise work and test on the main branch with the time they have for clonk.

My concern is that I believe we don't have the manpower and will to maintain those two branches, regularly switch between them and test those. Or well, that if we do it, the whole release & bugfix cycle will turn into a really lengthy and cumbersome process. Something, that I wouldn't like to see happening.

So, I'd vote for keeping one branch and when somebody wants to fire out a new update, he will note the team about his plan in advance so everyone has time to test his changes for stability or adheres from pushing some crucial changes just before that update.