this is the sort of thing I was thinking about when I was saying that things just needed to run, not implement everything.
I am thinking that the interfaces needed to just make things 'run' on a kernel.org kernel is much smaller than what people have been trying to get submitted. And then once this smaller set is in place, things can be worked on much more easily.
while I have your attention, did you see Neil Brown's proposal for a userspace wakelock-type daemon? how hard would it be to modify the Android userspace to work with his proposal? As I understand it, there's only one daemon that actually talks to the kernel, everything else in the Android userspace talks to that daemon.