Comment by dmlorenzetti

Regarding the idea to have some macros that expand to null when unwanted -- I have some "developer" macros that, in day-to-day use, do things like showing TODO items.

The most useful one typesets the labels of equations, sections, figures, and so forth, so I can copy-paste right from the document as I'm editing. That makes it so much easier to insert cross-references while writing, without breaking the flow to search out the definition.

Rather than commenting out packages, I have two top-level input files, which `\input{}` the actual content. Those files differ only where they read the developer-oriented definitions:

    \input{latex_input/defn/dev_defns_for_devs.tex}

versus

    \input{latex_input/defn/dev_defns_for_release.tex}