I understand you want to be able to run the replica locally in the context of proposal verification, which is a laudable goal. Yet, as Martin already wrote above, the replica as used from dfx doesn’t run all of the protocol – so running a replica in this setting does not even give you anything realistic.
On the positive side, in the context of Utopia, we are building additional options for deploying the replica code. (Utopia is supposed to run, e.g., with cloud providers or on premises.) So while that is still under development right now, I think it should help address your concerns (in an actual better way than the replica as part of dfx) in the future.