Permissions issue on cloud server

[supernal]

I migrated a lab instance of my site to an Ubuntu 14.04 server and have pretty much everything ironed out except one last hangup with permissions. Am wondering if anyone else has run into this or has any ideas

Essentially the software only seems very happy when I have the Apache user as both file owner and group owner. If I make my Ubuntu user the file owner, not so happy. I can leave the site running under this config and just change ownership to my Ubuntu user when I need to upload or edit something, but it seems to me there's probably a better way or something elementary that I'm missing in setting this up 

I've added my user to the Apache group and the Apache user to my user as a group and still no joy

[supernal]

The folder/file permissions are 755 and 644 respectively, which seems to be the global standard 

I haven't tested but think if I changed them to 775 and 664, allowing group writes, then the Apache group ownership would be fine and the user owner wouldn't matter as far as having the site run without issue 

However in reading up on this it seems that having Apache be able to write to any of the files, either as a write-enabled group or as the user owner, is a security issue. Can anyone confirm this is the case? 

[supernal]

I found this which confirms that while not inherently insecure it does increase your attack surface to have 775 / 664 permissions: https://serverfault.com/questions/312999/is-it-safe-to-chmod-775-664-with-owner-www-datawww-data

So that's out the window. However I can't figure out how to give the Apache user the permissions it needs otherwise. When I have it set to 755/644, IPS System Check indicates none of the directories are writable and eventually throws a configuration error which breaks the site