So, what I am referring to is the ability of a system to allow some rigor and robustness of tracking of experiments, and also enforcing some thoughts on how things might be deployed, early on in the development process, whilst not being overly prescriptive and cumbersome

I'm cannot agree more!!
VivaciousPenguin66 We are working on trying to better understand how to solve this very delicate act of balance and offer some sort of "JIRA" for ML.
If this is okay with you, once product people have concrete ideas to share, I'll connect them with you, this is a very exciting topic to try and nail down, and we would love more feedback from the community and real-world use cases.