Fast-forward able commit, otherwise fail

Hello,

I am trying to build a git workflow in our enterprise and am almost
evenly torn between a "rebase workflow" and git-flow (which uses merge
instead of rebase, obviously).  We are using Bitbucket for pull
requests as code reviews (right or wrong).

I apologize if my inexperience with git shows through, but I'm wanting
to achieve the following --

Maintain two long-running branches (develop as a stable pre-release,
master as a deployed version), with short-term feature branches off of
develop and short-term release branches that are based on develop and
merge into master eventually (ie. a lightweight git-flow).

However, as part of this, I would prefer to require/ensure that each
feature branch is up-to-date and otherwise able to be fast-forwarded;
we currently have this with the bitbucket server setting requiring
--ff-only.

The other half of what I would prefer is to still perform the merge
commit, though, to ensure separate tracking of the feature branches
(ie. --no-ff).

I know that I have read that --ff-only and --no-ff are contradictory,
but I believe that is somewhat ambiguously correct -- I believe the
two flags contradict in the sense of "what to do with the merge
commit", but not necessarily on the "when it can be done".

I read an ancient post about on this list (which predates the
tri-state of fast-forward) that I believe could have allowed this to
work.

I have also read a few articles and posts that achieve this more as a
matter of practice than a workflow enforcement via git flags; for this
to be something to potentially get absorbed into a Bitbucket workflow,
I suspect it would need to a git flag (they now support merging via
--ff, --no-ff, --ff-only, --squash, and --squash-ff-only for their
hosted solution, for example).

Here are a few articles that say they prefer this approach (rebase and
then merge --no-ff):
https://walkingthestack.blogspot.com/2012/05/why-you-should-use-git-merge-no-ff-when.html
http://blog.differential.com/best-way-to-merge-a-github-pull-request/
http://victorlin.me/tags/rebase

Can anyone share their thoughts on workflows that might achieve what
I'm looking at here or opinions on adding the functionality I'm
describing?

Thanks!