i've struggled with the 30 day refresh limit too. Many times we have production issues on custom development work which can only be replicated when using data in the production environment. This tends to happen when the issue relies on multiple records (and from multiple related objects), so reproducing the issue by creating the records in sandbox is next impossible (or time taking).

Among the many situations where you might want faster refreshes is if you're putting out changes to production every weeks (agile projects) and want to show the business users the progress against thier live data, but you can only refresh once every 30 days.

One more reason is when you want to test against actual data but already used up the refresh as part of another deployment. I know that refreshing the code changes is pretty straight forward through eclipse, the configurations are alittle more tricky, but the data is next to impossible because of referential integrity issues and the sheer number of objects containing the data needed. Also, if the development is data destructive (i.e. changes the data when executed), then the data must refreshed after every debug session.

For these reasons, i developed an app called SFXOrgData (www.sfApex.com) which transfers data from prod to sandbox or sandbox to sandbox (it figures out the relationships and includes those records as well). Its helped me out in these situations when we couldn't refresh the sandbox when we needed to. For times where there aren't too many objects involved, we used Apex Dataloader which worked well. I know that disabling/reenabling validation rules and triggers also became an issue because some data was there before the validation rule/trigger was ever put in place so i built in a mechanism that allows me to select if i want to disable them when transferring records.

If you ask me, I think that it would have been nice if Salesforce provided a way to refresh the sandbox more frequently, but another option (I'm not sure if viable) is to change your release on a Monthly or Quarterly maintenance release basis. I know in the real world, sometimes the users can't wait until the end of the month for a fix/functionality. There's alot of discussion around this (they say never change your testing cycle schedules because it will rush things and create more bugs) but life is life. Anyways, I hope this helps. Thanks