I'm afraid it won't work well

I'm afraid it won't work well

Developing against the mainline tree or a tree based on it limits the complexity of the changes that are allowed to happen between the releases. It assures that development happens in short, manageable steps. It may be hard to merge, but the changes are mostly limited to subsystems, and possible interference is cleaned up before the release.

When working on linux-next, the changes start interacting with each other early. That would allow bigger, intertwined changes. In may be easier to merge because the patches "grow" together, but debugging and cleaning the kernel for the release may be harder.

linux-next would also limit developers' exposure to the code that will be released as the next kernel version. It could make releases less stable.