The key pain for us that I think you're touching on is that "design/dev mode" isn't how teams actually work. Devs do far more design than we think. My experience is that designers do the pretty or complex pieces, while dev does the long tail "boring" designs. Often devs do the screen layouts since nav and routing can get a bit complex. Secondly, designers don't just hand off a design and that's it. The design system gets implemented as components, which have tweaks due to usability/issue reports/further design, and then the designers really want to be taking those components and recomposing them back into sections and screens. Ideally designers would be just setting props like images, text and ids faaaar up the abstraction layers, with dev components being automatically synced back in as they're built and updated.
So definitely think your setup is potentially hitting a sweet spot between dev/design. Just to validate it as as product - plus one for open source with a paid hosted tier for convenience. Devs get to tinker, and designers don't have to think about how to run it.