Comment by andy_ppp

Could Postgres provide a mechanism where delete works as you'd expect but you can add WITH DELETED keyword to a SELECT and it returns everything even deleted records? I guess migrations are still an issue if you want to change the structure of the DB but maybe you could provide these as part of the database too - so INSERT INTO table(col1, col2, newCol...) FROM DELETED (col1, col2, newDataNotInDeleted) WHERE id = 123 CASCADE; or something like this.

There should be a preferred way to handle this as these are clearly real issues that the database should help you to deal with.