Hi John,
For Urgent change there is no dependency on maintenance cycle so there is no issue you have seen
where as for Normal Changes there are multiple ways people can configure as it is aligned to maintenance cycle.
for e.g it can be configured in a such way that TR is only released POST UAT completed in pre-production this make sure that new changes can be done in development and imported to QA
again it varies from customer to customer so you need to check the configuration for ZMMJ and its aligned to Maintenance cycle phase.
I assume you might a variant created for it as well.
In addition, if want a job to do the import to pre-production etc based upon CD status you can go for status dependent import so that only released TR as per CD status will be imported...check below
Import strategies: Status Dependent import and Selective Import - Solution Manager - SCN Wiki
hope this helps
Thanks
Prakhar