We are looking for a best practice suggestion for Content Synchronization for Experience Manager. Code vs content and then production down? What are others doing?
It's best practice not to alter Production code in crx/de, rather than to manage the code with regular deployments with Maven.
When pulling production content down to a BETA or Staging environment, you can use the package manager. This method ensures that the content author's routines are not stopped during the time of content migration.