I think we should strive to keep master as close to "releasable" as possible at all times, do development on dev branch(es), and create release branches to which changes are only made by backporting from master. I think this is closer to a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) style.
I tend to agree with, especially if we have the ability to change the base of PRs against master to dev. To me, that would solve any usability problems with keeping master the master and dev the development branch.
I agree with your other points as well. There have been a couple of times where I downloaded applications sources and built them on master assuming that is the correct place... why wouldn't it be? Then finding that they do not work and that you really have to build on some branch. It would be best for every one if we didn't have to make things any more complex for the end-user.
Greg
