CI catches problems all the time. I don't think many of us can afford to build all the flavors and architectures in their laptops or workstations, so we have to rely on CI to catch all kinds of errors from compilation errors to bugs plus regressions, specially in a project which has so many build flavors.
I have had this experience in big projects several times and I can tell you it's always the same. So from extensive software development experience I write that we will be able to develop and merge much faster once we have a reliable CI running in short cycles, any other approach or shortcuts is just accumulating technical debt for the future that somebody will have to cleanup and will slow down development. Is better to have a CI with a reduced scope working reliably than bypassing CI. This is irrespective of using dev to merge or unprotected master. We can't afford to have increased warnings, bugs creeping into the codebase going unnoticed, build system problems, performance regressions, etc. And we have to rely on a solid CI for this. If we are not ready for this, we should halt feature development or at least merging new features until we have a stable codebase and build system.
