[skookum]

Reverting smaller diffs out of order to roll forward IS a patch under pressure. Usually most interesting features, the kind that tend to cause bugs that are not caught until deployment time, tend to come in as several patches over time. So reverting those means cherry-picking a set of patches, making sure you got the full set, making sure no subsequent patches took some subtle dependency on the ones being pulled, and so on. If you're in a compiled language, the set of patches is not too big, and the churn on your repo is low, then you probably have a decent chance of getting it right under pressure even if you have to untangle some refactors and such. If not, good luck.