Overwriting database with backup from older Drupal version?
Yes - in most cases, this should be a fairly straightforward operation. You should be able to migrate your updated modules from dev over to the live site and just run update to get everything running again. If there are going to be issues with this (for ex. a module that requires a little more configuration to get working), you can isolate these issues before-hand on your dev server (and it sounds like you've already done this successfully).

Most of the top contrib modules (ex. the ones you cite above) will be very careful at upgrading their structure without impacting any new data (or orders).