Hi Cliff,
It might be too hard at this point to completely avoid legacy classes
(unless you want to write a lot of your own functions). Maybe just post
each issue that you're having in a separate topic and someone can point
you in the right direction, rather than you wasting too much time on it.
If you have the time, it would be great if you document while you're
working through this all. Joomla 3 is desperately in need of
documentation and pioneers are the best ones to initially create the
documentation :) In case you're not familiar with it, we use a wiki for
the documentation that anyone can edit and add information/pages to:
http://docs.joomla.org/Developers
Also, if you create new classes, might as well submit them to the core :)
so that you can re-use them easily later and that others can help maintain
and improve what you've written.
Kind regards,
Nick