Risking to repeat myself:

This can only be solved with a real DEV environment.

As a pmdev I can only do static code analysis with one arm bound at behind my back.

And any patches are directly injected into the running system, I have to be available when the gods decide to do so.

That's like a doctor only allowed to scratch dead bodies to find a cure.

A god can log on to the machine and access the living creature, look into the logs and run queries against the DB. A god could find out if a code-snippet is relevant or just abandoned experiment.

A DEV environment would allow to fork the current engine, implement tests and run experiments.

Probably best in a container.

Wishful thinking, I know.