I am experiencing the exact same problem and for the same reasons. I dislike how the content being actively worked on for my site is live the whole time. Just looks sloppy on my part even though there isn't anything I can do about it other than consider alternative templates or platforms.
Another issue I have that is related to this problem is there doesn't appear to be a way to password protect individual pages within the portfolio folder either. This would be useful so that I could lock down content for specific pages that might have projects under NDA (among other reasons).
