Yep, like that.

Yeah, I got that. But the only-one I know with some Mapnik experience is Woody.

Well, that quite sucks - I should have mirrored the script... Well, I'll PM the author, maybe he can re-upload it.

Yes, unfortunately modRana documentation is currently quite lacking... Would you be perhaps willing to write a short guide/manaul ?

Concerning the labels:
around here = download is centered around current GPS coordinates (renaming this to "around current location or "around coordinates" might make this less confusing)
around view = download is centered around a point in the middle of the currently visible map (probably should be also renamed to "around map center")

This is roughly how it should work right now - there is a worker thread that processes tiles from a queue. Tile download threads - from automatic tile download or from batch download - supply tiles to this queue. Once the queue fills up (it can hold 50 tiles at once by default) all tiles are flushed to the database in a single transaction by the worker thread. At shutdown, the worker is notified and flushes any remaining tiles from the queue to the database.

Tile loading works in a similar manner - there is a tile loading worker thread that processes tile loading requests from a queue and loads tiles from database to a in-memory cache, guarded by a mutex. Not sure if the tile loading thread is really needed on on newer Python versions though.

Yeah, it might be a bit convoluted. It's structure basically like this:
mod_mapTiles - draws the map and automatically downloads visible tiles
mod_mapData - handles batch tile download
mod_storeTiles - handles tile storage, both to files and to sqlite, contains both worker threads mentioned above and all database handling logic

BTW, there is a description of the tile database structure on modRana project wiki.