At first sight I would agree to your structure. But there are several unknowns, which can influence this. A few thoughts: ACLs?Content reuse (same offer over stores of multiple brands), you might think about using CF/XFs for it. Also about asset reuse.Do you plan to use the MSM or the language copy ...

I assume that it can take a lot of time, but it should not have failed. How did you determine that it failed?

regarding the naming: yes, it's quite inconsistent. Replication = publishing. And if you take away the replication privilege from a user, then this user is not able to replicate directly; instead AEM will invoke this workflow.

Yes, it will be removed soon (loglevel degraded to DEBUG)

Have you tried to create a content package of that path, and then replicate the package?  Installing that package might definitely take a while, so I am not sure if that is acceptable.  

IMS cares about authentication and authorization; and for that you don't need to have multiple identities on AEM Stage and PROD environments. That's the reason your identity is tied to your email address and that you can connect only a single external directory (e.g Azure Directory) per domain to IM...

Make sure that the user does not have the "replication" privilege on that page. Then the default "request for approval" workflow is invoked, which you can customize.

So you want to map your Stage environment to use directory 1, while PROD is using directory 2? Can you explain why this you require this?  

since AEM release 12255 a feature is included, which allows users which are member of the "administrators" group to unlock all pages (also the ones not locked by themselves). This was hidden behind a Feature Flag, but that should be enabled to all environments by now.

I normally object to this approach, because the session object is not thread-safe. And even if this normally not a problem with just reading (as you barely corrupt on-disk data) there is no guarantee that you won't get inconsistencies in in-memory data-structures.I know that it works in at least som...