I guess the moral of the story is that using “production” to refer to the final product of making fonts is confusing to a lot of people (especially people who aren’t familiar with the use of “production” in other kinds of software development) and maybe should just be avoided altogether when formally referring to any stage of the process.
I like “development” (to refer to the development stage) and “final” (to refer to the final output), but almost anything seems better than “production” (for either / any / all stages).
Something like “binary” could also work for the final output, but that’s also not the most intuitive for people who aren’t as familiar with software development.