We've spent a lot of developer time chasing issues in our sandbox environment that turn out to be caused by version disparities between the sandbox environment and the production environment for products such as Video Center, and it's not clear whether the code will work when deployed to production. This wastes our time and resources and reduces our confidence that our code will work properly on production. (We've termed "push and pray" for those features.) Often, these changes will not be accompanied by release notes so we are unaware of them until we dig into the generated code.
A worse outcome would be finding that code works in sandbox but breaks in production, which has also caused us to lose quite a bit of developer changes.
I understand the need to validate version updates for all products, but they should be opt-in, or better yet, in a separate environment, so that we are not surprised by changes that are sprung on us.
Todd Dukart
To be clear, the core of this problem is that we have no way of testing our code with what's on production until we push to production. We do need to be able to test the changes you're making before pushing them live, but mixing our changes and your changes up in sandbox makes it impossible to tell where bugs come from.