I would argue that a dev environment that is identical to prod, no exceptions, is too constraining. As the OP points out, having root access in the VM to go willy nilly and try out new tools is a must for developers.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't have Jenkins setup from the start; I'm also a bit taken aback that they don't use automated code reviews before accepting patches to their "deploy" branch. Even for a small project, it's not that hard to setup Jenkins+Gerrit to reject patches that break tests (or have to pass whatever other hurdles you want).