Environment Promotion for Project Templates

I am looking for best practices regarding environment promotion, specifically for Project Templates. Based on my experience, and confirmed by Adobe, you cannot edit a Project Template and promote those changes to Production IF any of your changes involve deleting tasks.

For example, if, in Production, i have tasks 1-4 on my project template, and then i edit that template in SB to add tasks 5-6 BUT also delete tasks 3-4, upon promotion, my project template in prod will contain tasks 1-6

As a result, we cannot promote any updates to our project templates from SB to Prod without then needing to deactivate the template and making manual updates immediately after.

Has anybody else had a similar issue? There are workarounds, but this feels like a serious shortcoming of the WF environment promotion process. Am I approaching this wrong? Any best practices/solutions/workarounds to reduce manual intervention?