Would pretty much eliminate the benefit; there are currently a few special cases for 3.4 (particularly for the ICC builders, and the XP bot), which could go away.

For the record, the secret undocumented method for running a build on all custom builders is to fill out the third-to-last set of entry boxes (the one that includes a "Repo path" box) on http://buildbot.python.org/all/builders and click the associated 'Force Build' button.  It's really not that hard to request such a build, but I will grant that it's rather inconvenient.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be too hard to just add the branch back without the special cases around release time for a little while, but there may be some expected failures.