Good feedback! A take on my working environment is:
1. I hg pull -u occasionally to synch that new stuff does not break my present plugin design
2. Last week i did that and it does not break my budget module which is designed to not use or impact core (no sharing of tables by way of writing back except AD_Note.)
3. Long time ago i hit errors and could solve it by update the cspec query rather easily.
4. Update scripts, I have also done similarly to 2.0 daily source (see first scripts at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/red1/files/p2/)