Great write-up explaining some of our biggest problems.
Now this gave me an idea... Maybe a multi-regional public HAF servers for people to play with wouldn't be too bad. Could help with development by wiping state every X hours (since it's so easy to get a HAF server running nowadays) giving devs an opportunity to test their apps before releasing them into the public with their own HAF apps (and hopefully, several supporting nodes), or other node owners to test out custom HAF apps hosted on the nodes (i.e. public HAFSQL instance, balance tracker or the explorer even) will mull over this idea for a bit.
RE: A New API for Hive