I'd recommend moving to S123 Connect as I find it gives a considerably greater degree of control.
Republishing anything other than your original survey will result in data loss, but you could always link to the old Feature Layer. That way, you retain the old data, but this could make publishing updates much more convoluted.
Simply deleting any field and republishing a survey will NOT result in data loss. That is because even if you delete a field, it stays in the Feature Layer. In fact, you can delete something, republish, and then re-add that same field back in sometime in the future (need to use the exact same name) just fine.
If you are just changing out the questions in a list, you could use an external list instead of a built-in list. That way you don't need to update the survey to update the lists.
If you find yourself adding removing actual questions on a regular basis, again, I am a fan of Connect.
And lastly, if you are adding removing actual questions on a regular basis, maybe changing up the survey format could help alleviate some stress there. I am not sure what your project parameters are, but sometimes going back to the drawing board is helpful.
