Believe me - I would LOVE to have the Sandbox full time. I'm what passes for an admin here and I started at this company a year and a half ago knowing absolutely nothing about NS. Everything I've done so far here has been in Prod and it's caused me quite a bit of stress. Unfortunately, the sandbox is a big spend for us and management is already questioning the value of NS as an ERP so I was hoping we could do something for ~3 months and save some money on this.
That said - your points about this kind of work taking longer than initially anticipated are definitely good ones. Just trying to see what my options are here.