After the merge window closed...

I think the answer there may be a bit of queuing; let maintainers send in pull requests for future releases (fixing the contents of the pull) during the -rc7 or so timeframe, and just send reminders after. It obviously does nobody any good to test the reflexes of the maintainers.

In the SCSI tree's case, there's the odd situation of the maintainer having a set of changes together slightly after the start of the merge window, as a result of getting pull requests in response to the release of the previous version. The maintainer was holding off on sending these on to Linus in order to try to get them some more exposure in -next before sending them to Linus. The proper procedural change may be more on the side of telling Linus (early) that there's something baking in -next, and let Linus put off merging it until it's more baked or skip it if it's not testing well.