Merging would be a game changer! That's my #1 hurdle preventing us from any sort of feature/bugfix branching currently on the vertical solution I maintain.
And yeah, that's really on Claris to provide some kind of trustworthy "patch" system.
It would be tricky, but I do believe that community developers like yourself would be able to provide the complementary tools: adequate branch diffing and comparison, and automation/UI around the patch process. i.e. Claris doesn't need to do everything to make this a reality.