Multi-site multi-developer development with CCK

I have concerns about CCK. It seems to me that the promise of CCK is rapid form development, but how do teams handle keeping their data synchronized across platforms?

For example, I am accustomed to working on Open Source projects where each developer uses their own sandbox: their own Apache, Drupal, CSV/SVN and MySQL. All code changes are checked into a central repository and can be tagged for releases. All database changes are included as update hooks.

But how does one keep CCK under such control? We have discussed sane options such as the Backup-Migrate module and dbscripts to insane options such as database revision control or doing diffs on the database.

It seems to me that Drupal provides a clean way to manage this otherwise unruly behavior via update hooks, and that most developers who use CCK are not working on such a team. That is, they tend to be sole developers who simply keep a backup of the entire site.

A mandate was sent down from high above that requires my team to use CCK for the sole reason that they were sold on the notion that CCK would allow us to produce our CMS in a more timely fashion. However, I see a big risk on the "other" side of the project -- yes our developers can build the web forms quicker -- but at the cost of spending potentially twice as much time trying to merge all development. Not to mention keeping the site maintained with new business requirements.

I have read two articles on this subject so far, and neither one gives me much confidence that CCK is Enterprise ready:

http://heyrocker.com/drupal/content/deployment-and-change-management-pro...

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/moving-cck-field-changes-from-dev-to-live

I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Thanks in advance.