I emailed you directly earlier but I'd like to point it out here that I think the release process is far, far too complicated. The people who designed it obviously worked hard on it and it there is definitely value in what they designed but in practice there are clearly a lot of problems following it (as this email chain shows). One problem is that with the current approach it's impossible to do a bugfix only release without freezing all feature development (i.e. cherry-picking is forbidden but all commits must still go to master) which is unacceptable and was the original reason why a Release Process was created.
I put together a very simplified approach that results in only a single person, the Release Manager, have to learn it and do any work and only during a small feature freeze/beta window. Everyone else just makes pull requests to master. Things can be merged regardless of whether a release is in progress or not.