Keeping a Production and QA/Staging App in Sync?

Hi everyone, 

So in my world we have a concept of Production and Staging.

In production, changes are done using the Sandbox, while new pipelines are built in staging (since pipelines can't be used in the sandbox). 

Main issue I've run into , that cause me some headaches: 

1. I can't take my schema changes from the production app sandbox and duplicate them in staging. I have to manually make the same schema changes in 2 apps to maintain consistency during development to ensure people can test the changes End to end.
2. Developing pipelines in the "staging" app, and moving to a production pipeline (that works against the production app!) requires a deep audit of the pipeline, since the staging and production apps aren't identical in field ids (sometimes) , and the account slugs / table ids between Production and Staging are different. Generally easy to change via the YAMLs, so far less of a headache then #1

I've experimented with a couple things, but feel I am missing a key component Quickbase has that helps keep 2 apps in sync? 

• I don't want to marry prod data with Staging - so connected tables I feel won't work...? 
• Copy table from prod to staging, won't work since staging has table in identical names (so I can delete and copy from production? that doesn't sound desirable)
• Neither those table movement solutions keep table to table-relationships 

What seems like the easiest solution albeit not easy is:

• Copy the production app (without data) after every release, and make a new staging, I still have the issue of having to update all the pipeline slugs, and tables referenced in my old "staging" pipelines....while losing all the staging test data. This gets cumbersome with over a dozen pipelines. But seems like the best solution for now.....

Thanks for pointing me to any viable alternative solution, or at the very least sharing some ways to accomplish this.