The problem is that between a feature being ready and it going into production there is a certain amount of QA/tweaking that goes on. Before I was running into issues where I couldn't fix a much smaller bug than the new functionality due to not having a branch for that. The flow handles that with hotfixes, which I guess works well.

I do think the numbering is excessive however: web software releases so often on a one man team it's mostly extra work.