First bit, that's very useful, thanks!
Hm... When you switch to R&D mode, a number of things happen differently. I wonder if it'd be possible to create a "virtual" R&D mode from within BM, by setting a few variables or somesuch?


I'll change it from echoing status to echoing it into a file, so you can check if it's running. When I setup that script, i had no idea that'd actually be seen in BM :P

As far as using printf... Not really. It's a good idea, but it'd involve(at least) two sets of text lines, doubling the size of the file.
I could switch to printf completely... but that would exclude users of the stock kernel - not something I want to do.