Thank you for the question! If I may give my opinion, I'd wait with the branch cut, simply because merging to 2 branches would make contributing more time consuming for me, especially when there are multiple PRs/day to merge, and when we have a close deadline.
I don't know whether it's possible to release RC1 (and freeze ABI) without a branch cut, but I'd be ok with this as well, so that we would have an extra 1-2 weeks to finish the majority of the parameter renames without an additional merging overhead. Personally, I think releasing RC1 is realistic now, since parameter names in the most important extensions (- ext/spl) have already been reviewed. Regards, Máté
