We are in the exact same situation and currently evaluating our possibility to use Developer Edition.
We have a few third party applications running in production, and a copy of these in our dev/test environments to be able to test/stage version upgrades and facilitate ongoing development of new features before deployment into production. These test environments are never used in any production scenarios; not acting as cold standbys for DR, not connected to production system and not accessible by any end users. The only thing that have us confused is this line:
"And any test data that was used for design, development or test purposes must be removed prior to deploying the software for production use."
Our development is continuous, so we have a constant need for our test databases. Multiple development efforts also utilizes the same test databases. Why would/should we have to wipe our test databases prior to each deployment. It makes no sense.
Can anyone share some insight into what this line actually means and MS reasoning behind it? Apart from this caveat, we believe we qualify completely for Dev Edition, and it would make a huge difference for us financially since we are currently paying just as much for our DevTest-and Production environments.
Thanks in advance!