Actually it was a poor qa/test relationship that destroyed git flow for me. Because the presence of release branches made the PO confident they could release a

Actually it was a poor qa/test relationship that destroyed git flow for me. Because the presence of release branches made the PO confident they could release any fixes or "emergency features" they wanted, they kept the QA team on the release branches while the dev team kept cranking through the backlog until it came time to validate like a year's worth of work and QA+PO threw up their hands and said it was too much to validate. So now I don't merge a feature unless I know it's allowed to be released. If it's not releasable, it's not merging.