For some reason this post had the highest density of stuff I wanted to reply to:

There's legitimate reasons to not run R&D mode. Honestly the only reason I've found in the long term to run it is when hardware bugs (the little internal capacity/batter doesn't charge, so if you let the battery discharge it starts to boot loop instead of actually charging when it gets bad enough - turning on R&D mode avoids that), or software bugs (on my first N900 it seemed that the watchdogs or the lifeguard reset killed stuff).

But besides that I happily ran without R&D mode on my N900s for a long while - I used to say everyone should be running it too, but honestly I don't really have strong reasons to advocate either way... but I kinda mellowed out with regard to that position over time.

Did you forget my rdmod utility? That'll turn your R&D mode on for you right on-device. (That said, right now that's only available in source form, possibly outdated source form, because I really suck at following through on my package compiling/uploading-to-repos plans.) Admittedly you need to be able to run commands as root... but now that everyone should have the ability to do on their devices.

Funny enough lots of people do, actually. You know, they're not exactly app stores, but they use the distro-provided GUI wrapper around the actual package managing stack.

Like 'fkdep', perhaps? (Another one of those projects which I need to get around to integrating some improvements on and pushing into the repos, as of a year now, but it's a basic shell script, should work on even a purely stock N900, and it will build 'fake' (empty) .debs for you, which you can then install. Like rdmod, it's in one of the few threads I started, so should be easy to find.)

How did this end up going?