At the CiviCons and developer meetings this year, we've had several conversations about release strategy. The topic is a bit abstract -- touching on a web of interrelated issues of technology and scheduling and business-process. I've been searching for a way to explain this topic to people who don't eat and breathe code in CiviCRM's git repos -- an analysis which is a bit simpler and more transcendent.
The best analysis predates us by a few years -- Will Durant attributed the idea to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, paraphrasing: