I would vote for one testing batch for everything. It would also make sense to agree in advance on the features to be implemented beforehand as it would reduce development time too.
Regarding “approval“… this is an open community so we discus openly any concerns that may arise. The testing indeed is a pain as not many members are involved. Potential differences in the hardware are also something to take into account.
With the addition of Hestia32 (expect a public alpha release next month) this is only going to get more complicated.
I would suggest to announce a new future release and throw in all the feature requests and/or bugs into it to vote what to include and what to leave out for the next release. Then we can work on something we have all agreed on.