Thanks for answering so many questions. And thank you bodhi and rcxdude as well! I had an idea that best practices might still be an emerging topic. My unclear question about merging was indeed about conflicts, so I'm glad to hear that the merge philosophy is to be "stupid" as rcxdude said. I'll do some more research and check those links.
The best resources I've found for understanding git workflows are by Vincent Driessen[1] and Atlassian[2].
The Atlassian page is much more comprehensive, and in fact derives the 'GitFlow' workflow from Driessen. However, I prefer his original top-to-bottom representation (a left-to-right time axis seems less intuitive to me - they remind me of a football playbook rather than a waterfall).
