I never said it was easy. ;-) I said it was work-able without a device. Trust me I am well aware of how "very" hard it can be trying to debug something remotely w/o having a device. (I've been doing development for over 20 years) -- And to top that off my own learning style (and my ability to debug) is completely hands on/physical. My wife hates when I "show" her how to fix a problem because I literally have to take control of her machine -- I can't verbally walk her through it. I am a very hands on type of person. But the point is yes the device would be very nice, and it would allow certain tests to be easily performed. But most things can be done in the scratchbox and tested their. You can get it running; then you can ask the community to vet the project and make sure their are no other "oddities" that show up on the real device. If you are unaware -- you need to know the Scratchbox runs the same versions of the software the device does. When I pull a library from extras in the scratchbox; it is the same library a n900 would pull. So they are a lot closer than I think you think they are.

Nathan