Importing/Exporting, but not everything
You don't wish to just pull down the production environment to your development server? This is how we solve this problem at work, by only editing the production server's database and then pulling it when it is updated.

There are quality scripts for syncing environments from the command line. You can simply run ./pull_db.sh and it will do everything for you.
https://github.com/nystudio107/craft-scripts

There are also new craft 3 plugins for export/import but I have not had much success so far.