Writing to existing GDB w/topo, feature class datasets and domains

I thought I knew how to do this but it broke for some reason. My workspace has a GDB that contains a feature dataset that has domains assigned to a few of the feature classes and it also has topology. I set up a simple transformer to sort and do an area calc. Then, I need to write back to that same GDB while keeping the domains. I recently lost the domains assignment and when I tried to update the workbench now it fails to write anything. I've tried multiple methods and each has a failure like 'cannot delete layer that has topology' or 'cannot make edits out of an edit session'. How should I set up my writer? I'm not sure I want to overwrite existing if I can help it.