Have you tried synchronizing three disparate feature branches this way? I don't think it's really possible. We had a very bad experience trying to do that.

The thing is, I want my developers to code, not talk all the time about what/where they would like to code and that the others have to wait until they're finished or suck up the merge conflicts if there's no time. Some communication is always necessary - but this solution with feature branches requires constant communication and still, the developers would rather wait that try to synchronize this way.