Exactly that was the point: the assumption that we don't make pull requests upstream.

For instance, I wasn't careful and I made a pull request for LUN-866 to the original baseline (on 2.3.x)... and the difference was about 144 commits (if I recall well). That's why I said that in this case we could only dream to cherry pick small stuff when we want a new thing in our branch. From this state, it's basically our responsibility to maintain the code.

Ideally we would make - like you said - pull requests to upstream.