I've worked in large companyies very successfully using TBD and releasing quarterly to enterprise customers using our software on their systems.
care to elaborate? curious about those companies and the software you are talking about.
i totally see the trunk based process work for software that doesn't need to maintain multiple versions as the original commenter said.
but for multi-versioned software you can't afford to have a single trunk and let your developers have a go at it. i went and checked the repos for some of the multi-versioned software that i use that are open-source.
well confirmed.
From a customer point of view a hotfix vs new release should be no difference. You just have to ensure that all releases are interface-compatible with the previous one. The cost of this is well worth it compared to the complexity of juggling multiple branches in parallel.
Some times they were working on changes on a release before a hotfix was addressed, and with cherry-pick's like operations, they took the changes of the hotfixes and applied to the service-pack and new versions with less effort than before they used the model.
With a dev team of 10 programmers, 20 on IT support and hundreds of client's deployments they build a profitable business (subscription-based and in-site support) where the branching model helps a lot.
They spend less time managing the releases, switching context for priority support and dealing with more changes in less time.