A little late to your post, but figured I'd put in my $0.02. Hopefully you've found a solution that will work for you!
We are a small-ish sized water utility: 27,000 service connections on over 600 miles of water main. I am using python to automate the reconcile-post process. It works well for us because there are only 3 of us editing at one time and rarely are there any conflicts. I perform QAQC edits in the DEFAULT version and favor all conflicts towards that version, and that's good enough for me. If the automated conflict resolution is a concern, you can set a parameter in the script process to abort if any conflicts are found, review the conflicts, then re-run the script. You might want to re-search the implications of aborting the process when a conflict is found. One problem of course is that usually you would want to run the script after-hours or on the weekends and now that possibly leaves you attached to reviewing conflicts after hours.
I built in error handling throughout the script and have it write to a SQL Server logging table the specific error that was found or if the script was run successfully. A SQL Server trigger on the logging table or function in python to send an email after an error is raised would take it to the next level; I have yet to do that....
In general, I have found automating the process to be a big help. There are many errors that can be introduced when doing this process manually, and hard-coding in all the steps in the right order has reduced a lot of headaches for me.
