Think about this scenario; Before entering production with a cusom workflow, you develop it and test it on an offline system. This system only hava a minimal number of users and issues. When you develop a workflow you might have to write a custom plugin. This plugin must be tested several times inside Jira. This whole process requires a lot of changes and tweaks to the workflow all the time. And this means you have to copy active workflow, remove workflow scheme from project, remove workflow from scheme, assign workflow to scheme, add workflow to project every time you want to test a new change. Please let us have an development mode for workflows, making them easier and faster to develop!