As of now, we have 14 issues on the 1.2.x milestone, plus 6 issues on the 1.2.x known bugs milestone.
Since there's still a lot of work to be done on these before the rc1, I'm thinking I will continue to hold off on creating a 1.2.x branch. (Creating the branch would mean all of the pending PRs would have to be merged both to master and then manually pulled back to 1.2.x -- totally doable, or course, but an extra step.) Once we're down to only a handful, that might be a good time to create the branch.
Are there any objections to continuing to hold off? The downside is we can't continue to merge non 1.2.x "blue sky" PRs in the meantime.
Mike