Hey David,
Thanks for your reply. Seems like something of this order is more possible in PostGIS, DB2 or Oracle, but the ArcSDE renaming limitation in SQL Server makes the aforementioned three database setup (Dev, QA, Production, QA and Production being exact copies of each other) a lot of maintenance. I had attempted snapshot replication in the past but it turns out that you cannot not drop tables on the parent (QA in my case) once they are part of a SQL Server replica (only ALTER TABLE is allowed on tables part of a replica). This was a no-go for our current ETL process which requires us to drop existing tables when moving from Dev to QA. In the end I will likely go with a straight Dev to Production ETL that incorporates QA into the process itself. Long term we may move toward using an ETL tool such as FME (we do everything in ArcPy now) that is more accommodating for schema changes as ArcGIS' middleware replication leaves a lot to be desired in that category. I'm going to wait a day or two to see if anyone has any other ideas before I mark your answer as correct.
Thanks,
Conor