yeah this is the newer version of conky i'm working on, nobody was maintaining it since the initial release so I asked to get the source and admin access to the monky project.
the conf file definately won't work with older versions in a useful way because i am making heavy use of "voffset" to have both left and right aligned text on the same line. I couldn't get it to work anyways, but I forget if it's even a feature of the old version or not.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying about the battery, I'll have to re-read this stuff later when I have time.
I like your idea of having dual configurations for portrait / landscape mode, I'm not sure how to implement that but I'll definitely try to figure something out. I would think conky only reads the .conf file on load, so polling the system for the current orientation would have to be handled in the code somehow.
You should ask Titan if he disabled that on purpose to save... something. It would make sense to disable it in the kernel if tracking io stats is likely to consume too much cpu.