There is a little understood flag to the build system called --release, which has few if any real effects other than to disallow the use of certain other build system flags.

A more useful version of this flag would not simply prevent the use of flags that are not appropriate for release, but would toggle the defaults for other flags as appropriate for the selected type of build.

Such a flag would need to default to options appropriate for release so that external users of the build system would default to a release quality build. But the --build-type flag could offer other modes, such as dev or testing that provided a better default experience for particular other build goals. In particular, this would allow developers to have a much simpler SCons invocation but still get a build with optimal behavior.