Thank you for being open about the situation and the problems involved. Rather than repeating the "YOU DON'T NEED THAT FEATURE" crap! And there is a lot of that in the forum. I do admit that many many features requested are unnecessary, ugly and probably dangerous, but somtetimes there are some excellent Ideas and those should be at least recognized as such, even though the implementation may be temporarily challenging. Honesty pays off! You are doing a great job.

nice writeup, jamis. Personally, when i hear my brain prepare a sentence with the words "just" or "only" in them, i force myself to stop and re-evaluate what i am about to say. The problem of estimation grows exponentially as your application increases in size, as your development group experiences turnover, etc. There are times when i know 100% that a given thing will "just be a conf file change," but those times are few and far between.