There's the production cluster then there's the development environments one of which happens to be the staging branch but it is not different in configuration

There's the production cluster then there's the development environments one of which happens to be the staging branch but it is not different in configuration from any web-1234 feature or bugfix branch. It doesn't add anything in costs as I doubt we could use a smaller machine (or is it two machines? can't remember but doesn't matter) than the current one just because we allow one less env... I thought this is what virtualization and all that was about?? And I absolutely can't see how could we drop the environment for feature branches -- not only QA is necessary but also if you want to talk to a stakeholder, how are you going to?