From a contributor perspective, what I meant is when you submit a PR for a fix, just make sure you that the fix is based on the master branch. This allows us to better integrate your fix into the repository when the time comes. If it is deemed to be something that needs to also be applied to adjacent branches, we can do that using a cherry-pick from master on an as-needed basis.
So in short, just find a jira issue that needs fixing, prepare the fix based on master and send the PR based on master. From there, we can handle the rest.