"Aurora is expensive and makes exporting data a pain. I have no intention of using it until it’s easy to set up external replication so I can fail over to other providers (or leave). No external replication, no business, especially at that price point. Aurora was quite a disappointment."

Aurora MySQL supports raw access to the binlogs. Aurora Postres supports Activity Streams and Logical Replication. Both are well support by DMS, which can even support replicating and converting between different types of databases - it's designed to support moving into AWS, but nothing's stopping you to use it to replicate in the other direction.

RDS is worth every penny, in my opinion. Of all the technology I've used in my career, it's one of the most impressive.