Working around Microsoft Dynamics Campaign sync limitations

I think storing campaign members in lists is a pretty solid approach. And if - and only if - Marketo is the only actor that adds - or removes - records from MSD campaigns, these lists should be accurate. The whole thing falls apart though, if Dynamics adds persons to campaigns too. Then Marketo has no knowledge of that.

W/o the native MSD campaign- Marketo program sync capabilities, most people usually manage the program-campaign membership sync, progression steps, etc. manually.

In my experience, most people manage this via the lists and Marketo campaigns - however, there are users too who have implemented a middleware to facilitate the sync b/w Marketo program and MSD campaigns, but I feel the extra overhead of implementing, managing, and cost is justified in the cases where-in campaign-program sync happens to be either mission critical and of utmost importance for a business or they have lot of programs & campaigns due to which manually managing the sync is rather difficult/more time consuming.