Sync Features with Initiatives in Releases

We currently use the default setup in JIRA where Epics are linked to Initiatives and Stories are linked to Features in Aha. We have a fairly complex release planning process where JIRA versions and Aha 'Releases' do not match up at all. This is because we release code every sprint, but need to schedule major releases with full company involvement.

Current Setup

 These major releases would be a great place to leverage Aha to do capacity planning, schedule phases, etc. Except Aha doesn't really operationally integrate well enough to enable it. We'd like to have all tasks, stories, etc created and linked to the epics in JIRA that are planned to release to sync with Aha and enable us to show progress toward the major release. Unfortunately, in Aha, features can only manually be added to release or synced through the JIRA version number.

This doesn't really work given our setup.

Proposed Solution

Enable syncing releases to initiatives rather than features. Automatically sync all features from associated initiatives to releases.

Why?

It seems like all the features around releases are built toward long-term release planning. They generally contain multiple initiatives and multiple phases. However, currently in order to add features to releases the have to be either added manually in Aha or synced to version number in JIRA. Since each release our team is releasing hundreds of individual features it is unmanageable to manually sync this. In addition, as new tasks and features are added in JIRA, these things do not sync to the release, making all the tracking and planning available in releases irrelevant.

We currently get around this by not using releases at all and having a report around the specific epics / initiatives we want to release. However, we could use releases if this change were made.