Today I've been playing with command blocks and triggers, and damn, it's blown open a whole bunch of options - And I was right earlier, it does solve some problems and bottlenecks I had.
But yeah, after a couple of months on the back burner, this is in production again.
Maybe the New 'n' Tasty footage inspired me a bit. Hopefully I'll get this done in time for you guys to play while you wait for the new Abe game (even though it'll probably only be 3 or 4 hours long at most).
EDIT: I tell you though, I really, really wish RedPower2 was in vanilla Minecraft. It'd make Redstone so much easier to work with... Shame I'd like the map to be compatible with vanilla Minecraft.