Because I'm not a developer, I can't give direct advice, but I can share with you what I learnt when going to a meeting where Phil Beadle was talking and he decscribed his developer environment on a big project where there are about 40 developers in their own teams.

Each developer has their own instance of DNN on the machine, from my understanding where they test their code. They develop using VS2005 using Team Services (I hope I'm using the right words) and they only use the two DLL's the main DotNetNuke dll and the membership one and then it doesn't use so many resources each time they compile or debug it.

They use a principle called SCRUM where the project is broken into small sections  - I went to another meeting where I learnt about how a large governmental department is using this principal very successfully -  

From my understanding - this project which Phil talked about has about 45 developers in  groups all working independently.  Maybe if you check Phil's blogs or better still - Michael Washington - who's got a huge information base on module development and has tutorials, and code, and perhaps with your skills in developing which are 1000 times better than mine - some of these places might help you get more knowledge.. and happier developers.

I also know from how Phil describe the project it did take some time to get these guys to listen.. but I think it's just a learning curve like anything else.

Nina Meiers