Frustrated with Collaborate as it doesn't work in so many cases - any advice?

So we (a small team of 3 people) have been trying to use Collaborate for about 2-3 years now as setting up Git or something similar has proven to be even more of a desaster.

Frequent problems we run into are the breaking of references, here's how it occurs:

1. I make a new public field for e.g. a GameObject, a Sprite or something
2. Then I fill this field via Inspector with a reference.
3. Save the game, then push to Collaborate.
4. Other dev pulls the collab, checks out the public field: It has no reference anymore.

This happens EVERY time we do this - the only way to avoid this (kind of) is for the other developer to always restart his Unity after he pulls from Collab.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to handle this problem? We can't really continue our production anymore because this is slowing us down so much.

 

Adding to what I said above, I would also like to hear some additional clarification on the "State of Collaborate". Only by pure chance did I come across the post by @marie-unity in the stickied *Collaborate Update v1.3.2* thread:

Additionally, we have evaluated several options on how to best reach our stability, performance and scalability goals for the future of the product. In taking an honest assessment of our roadmap, it has become clear that leveraging proven backend solutions such as Plastic SCM, Perforce, and GitHub is more likely to succeed at reaching those goals within a reasonable time frame. The Collab backend as it exists today will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future while we are working on a new solution.
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This, to me, reads like Collaborate will practically be put on life support in the near future, no substantial future updates will be given, and Unity is 'working on a new solution'.

Collaborate currently doesn't work as advertised. It barely works at all. There have been almost no (to me) noticeable improvements in the past. Extreme bugs are still in there and are not even adressed in any way.

Where do I turn now? We still have development-breaking errors in using Collab and now there won't even be any updates?