RDS is pretty expensive for what you get. You can't restore to a running instance from snapshots, you get very little control over the environment, and you can't replicate between geographic regions (only availability zones).
I know you said you're a two man shop, but in this case it may make more sense to leverage other IaaS DB services instead of RDS.
"You must create a DB snapshot before you can restore a DB instance from one. When you restore the DB instance, you provide the name of the DB snapshot to restore from, and then provide a name for the new DB instance that is created from the restore. You cannot restore from a DB snapshot to an existing DB instance; a new DB instance is created when you restore."
"you get very little control over the environment" also seems spurious. You get parameter groups to control just about everything you can from a standalone mysql instance. logs or things that load from disk (LOAD DATA ...) are the only things you can't touch, but a small price to pay for automated backups, failover and scaling (both up AND down...)
In my opinion, you don't get enough control over the environment for what you're paying on a per hour basis. Automated backups? Great, they aren't that difficult to being with. Failover? Sure, within the same AZ, when you need to be doing it between datacenters. Scaling? I will grant that it scales up and down fast automagically.
I know you said you're a two man shop, but in this case it may make more sense to leverage other IaaS DB services instead of RDS.