[secondcoming]

> The more time that passes from the point a branch is broken off from develop to the time it is merged back in, the more opportunity there is for other branches to diverge in drastic ways.

When a release is made you should merge those changes into other branches too. Then merge-conflicts or behavioural changes are found, and fixed, earlier.

[notreallyserio]

This can be tricky. I worked somewhere that did this and it ends up forcing some devs to deal with multiple conflicts a week while they're working on a branch, when they could instead keep an eye on what is going on in main and deal with the conflicts on their own schedule.

[nicoburns]

The problem here seems to be devs working on a branch for a whole week. If you break down tasks smaller than this and merge them separately then you end up with far fewer merge conflicts.

[secondcoming]

I'd put that under the 'Too Bad' category. If a branch is so far behind reality/master then any testing done on it is quite likely to be invalid, and it won't have any hotfixes that were deployed in the meantime.

YMMV