I've had people losing work as a result of Content Workflow. User error, but I think it can be prevented easily. Here's how to lose your stuff without realising, and a suggested improvement.

With Content Workflow on, create a draft version with some edits. Then switch to view the live content instead of the work in progress. If you now click edit, it is now possible to make changes to the live version without warnings, and these edits will be overwritten when someone publishes the draft content.  I can see why this has been permitted, because it may be necessary to tweak alive version before draft content is ready, but I've had cases where people have done this by accident and lost content. The lost content is of course present in the editing history, but in my cases the user was unaware anything had gone wrong.

Suggestion: if the user clicks "edit" when viewing the live content, when draft content exists, could we have a popup warning along the lines of "Warning: a draft version of this content exists. Changes to the live content will be overwritten when the draft is published."

I don't really want to restrict this user from editing live content - that would be overly restrictive in our scenario. I just felt that with a warning message in this situation we could reduce the risk of accidental content loss - my case is not hypothetical, and it is competent users who have fallen into this. You're right we can recover content from history, but only if someone notices the problem quickly. The way things are now, I just feel it is a little too easy to overwrite content without knowing it.