Multiple versions as in what way? I have one for each department(that will be accessing the data), which will then get posted to myself and my college who will then decide to to post to the Default.
I see five versions: Each and every one will have to be reconciled and posted to sde.default. That's more administrative work than I have time, energy, or interest in. . When I first started in the SDE environment in version 8.x, I had a version for every user. It didn't take long for me to figure out it wasn't efficient and didn't provide any value. But if it works for you, that's great; I don't claim to have all the answers, just the gray hair.
What would be your ideal workflow for this situation
Ideally? Me on the beach in Mahahual Quintana Roo, Mexico, still drawing a pay check while my energetic assistant answers all the complaints and does the actual work. All seriousness aside and beachwear not withstanding, what I do works for me, and may or may not work for you. I have a much smaller operation with respect to data, and I have fewer users. I use the enterprise versioned data model for data editing only. Everything else, like published services, network analysis etc are done with file geodatabases that are child replicas of the enterprise gdb.
Best of luck.
That should just about do it....