That makes sense, but it's worth noting what you have now is not entirely dissimilar to how "extended maintenance" works for our official stable branches as well (continuing to merge some backported fixes, but not tagging any further point releases).
Yeah, I understand. This is all working towards a revision of Ironic release policy to ensure it's documented when/how these releases are supported. Right now we create bugfix releases as months 2 and 4 into the cycle, with no indication of support length. In fact; there are leftover bugfix/[] branches that are not maintained and have not yet been retired. Posts like this (and my efforts to get releases done) is part of my fact-finding for trying to ensure how Ironic manages releases is well documented and understood. -Jay Faulkner