I'm trying to come up with a local development workflow for wordpress that actually works. I'm pretty new to this whole thing but I'm surprised this is so complicated. So far I've been using Git and WP Migrate DB, but that no longer will cut it after launching the site.

Under another question it's suggested that one should never make database changes on a staging environment. This seems absurd to me, since that would make any meaningful change impossible outside of isolated plugin or theme updates. Doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of having a local dev environment? What if I need to change the front page or the menu or anything really?

I could simply use WP Migrate DB or some similar tool if Wordpress wouldn't store everything but the kitchen sink in the same Posts table. Is there a good way to update some post-types while leaving other (user generated) post types intact? WP Migrate DB has an "ignore post types" feature but apparently that still overwrites everything on the other side, so it's not very useful.

I really don't want to end up with manual exports and pages long mysql queries in order to avoid directly editing the live site on a daily basis. Both seem to be terrible ideas.