Wow, impressive long statement! I'm actually short in time and just can reply a short answer.

First of all: thanks to all you guys who ARE developing stuff for maemo, meego and everything in between. I know that it is hard work and I really want to show the respect you deserve. But seeing so many different, incompatible ways to boot different systems or kernels makes me wonder where this will lead to. Moving developers in early stage of developing to a versatile and usable bootloader might be easier than trying to rebuild a huge toolchain to which people are used to. And by the way, I see no reason in dongling the bootloader to a kernel like uboot seems to do. The advantage of independent bootloaders is the fact that you can change every kernel and might even add news devices on the fly without having to worry about the loader.

Last point: Meego is kind of a killer app for N900 and everybody wants to run it or at least wants to try it out. There is no line like here-are-developers and there-are-users. When something like this easy-to-flash image and a loader like uboot is out, people are using it!