It's starting to be apparent to me that if you want to use the Collector app to gather field data then you are going to have to use the featured service layer locally if you want any updates from Collector, or as you suggested purchase Arc Server. I understand what you are saying about creating a local "copy", but if I have 10 layers that I want to update locally this becomes impractical. I'm not sure what the solution is, but there doesn't seem to be a convenient way of updating the local data base. In ArcPad you could check data in and save it locally. Seems like they could easily do the same thing, but pull it from the featured service layer. It doesn't seem like that would be very hard for ESRI to resolve, but I'm gathering they do not want to do that. Maybe I'm old school, but I want the "master" file/layr on my local machine. Plus, I'm in southeastern, rural Ohio and work for a rural drinking water utility. We don't have the greatest of internet connections here. I'm starting to think that Collector may not be the best solution for rural utilities/areas where access to the internet isn't so prevalent.
Thanks for your replies, Jake. I appreciate you taking the time to offer a solution.