[horsawlarway]

Yup - I agree. I think we'd get along just fine :)

It can be nice to generate release notes from the commits in the merge between the latest release and master, but you can honestly get the same info in a variety of ways (and depending on the team - it may be particularly noisy)

Basically - I think as long as tagging is happening somewhere, and that tag reflects the actual code released, I don't really have a strong preference on the branching around the process. Sort of an implementation detail that doesn't matter that much.