Cloning Doctypes in Production?

Hello all!

Hopefully I can get some help with this. I have four different project types that have to differ WILDLY from each other.

So I’m trying to clone the “Project” doctype 4 different times essentially.

I tried ‘customize form’ and copying that, doesn’t work of course. Neither does copying the doctype to a new one as it yells at you, " Cannot copy, Not in Developer Mode."

Is making a custom app really the only way to do this, or am I missing something?

P.S.
These different projects require different permissions, naming schemes, links, web portals, email templates, and it would just seem to be much cleaner to have different doctypes than try to managing 300 different conditional scripts and visibility.

P.S.S. No major edits to the doctype needed beyond cloning and using the GUI already provided.

Any help or thoughts would be wonderful!