In your practice, what release strategy is more successful: major or patch?

Being a 25-year veteran in CRM space with a solid list of our own CRM tools for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, we've developed a certain strategy for product releases.

Even though, we use both major and patch release practice , dealing with releases for Salesforce managed packages we found out certain differences in their purpose.

For example, a major release allows the package publisher to include new components and modify existing components (with restrictions).

On the contrary, a patch release is a better fit for the package publisher to change the functionality of existing components, but not add or remove any.

This is typically how bugs and other errors (such as those sometimes introduced with Salesforce seasonal updates) are resolved.

Also, we came across certain disadvantages of both methods. For instance, only admins can manually install the update in major release and ,moreover, a major release cannot be pushed to existing deployments and instead requires the admin in the target organization to manually install the update.

And patch releases limitations reflect in increasing technical debt in your project since the components will become more complex as additional features are added.

Can you add your pros, cons and best practices for releases of product updates & upgrades?