I ran into issues with blockchain corruption and the dreaded:

Starting chain with 0 blocks...

I seem to get this error everytime I CP a witness_data_node_dir around. I didn't know how common that would be, so to avoid people saying "hey this broke" I decided to go the long route and just have people create it twice.

But - It's totally possible to do it this way, and it would save time. But if you run into errors like I did, just start over and compile from scratch ;)