Number of steps require to do a Git merge
===

I need a bit of advice on the merging my development branch to the master branch.
Also note that I'm using Git Extensions so try to avoid too much command line jargon if possible.

Say I've made 3 commits on the **dev** branch (and I still currently have it checked out, and the **mst** branch has 1 commit after from when I branched off.

    dev:    1 ---> 2 ---> 3
           /
          /
    mst: 0 --- X

Now I want to merge my **dev** branch into the **mst** branch BUT, I actually only want to merge commits 1 & 2.

My understanding is that I'll need to CHECKOUT **mst** (stash or make a temp commit beforehand for any in-progress work) and merge **mst** with commit 2.

    dev:    1 ---> 2 ---> 3
           /        \
          /          \
    mst: 0 --- X ---- 4

Now, commit 3 is *out of sync* so the next thing to do is to *re-sync* the **dev** branch.
To do this, I need to CHECKOUT **dev** and either merge **dev** with **mst** or rebase **dev** onto **mst**

ie.

    dev:     1 ---> 2 ---> 3 --- 5
            /        \          /
           /          \   ------
          /            \ /
    mst: 0 ---- X ----- 4
or

    dev:    1 ---> 2     5
           /        \   /
          /          \ /
    mst: 0 --- X ---- 4

The main issue that doesn't sit well with the other developers is that merging might become a huge time waster because

1. you need to "save" your current work, then checkout **mst** then go back to checkout **dev**  (we're using VB6, so we also need to close and reopen VB6 to reload the files because of potential merge conflicts and VB6 doesn't recognise files that have been modified externally)
2. the double merge process (one to *update* **mst** and the other to *re-sync* **dev**)

Also, I've had some reliability issues with stash (sometimes stash pop prevents me from popping), which is why I suggest to my fellow developers to just make a temp commit (after commit 3), then do a mixed reset at the end.

We're a small company so getting things out as fast as possible is a priority (but we can't push out everything because some things be held back).
Is this many steps actually required, or is there a faster way?