In short, no.
It’s not reasonable to start a feature freeze until that list of issues is small enough that the feature freeze will be short, say less than a month.
If it takes longer than a month or so, we’d more likely start losing developer interest than encourage extra effort on the part of developers.
If we had enough manpower one the merge side of things, we could fork into a stable and development branch, merging only bugfixes to the stable branch, and features and bugfixes to both. However that is precisely what we are short of, so it doesn’t help.
